GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet

Team Internet is to take over back-end duties for .co, after agreeing to take less than half as much as GoDaddy was charging.

The London-based company has teamed up on a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia’s communications ministry, MINTIC.

The handover will put an end to GoDaddy’s 15-year stint as .co’s back end. The TLD was relaunched globally as a .com alternative in 2010 by .CO Internet, which was subsequently acquired by Neustar and then GoDaddy.

It seems Team Internet was willing to price its services much lower than GoDaddy. The company said in a statement that Equipo PuntoCo is getting 8% of gross revenue from .co sales, compared to the 19% GoDaddy was getting and the 93% .CO Internet originally received. The rest goes into the Colombian public purse.

While it’s not the biggest TLD on Team Internet’s servers (that honor goes to .xyz), it’s going to be the second or third largest migration of a single TLD between registry services providers in the history of the DNS.

.co had about 3.2 million domains at the start of the year. Today, Team Internet says it has “more than 3 million”. It’s the same ballpark as .au’s 2018 move from Neustar to Afilias, which was 3.1 million names, but a million shy of this year’s migration of .in from GoDaddy to Tucows.

When it comes to retaining the big ccTLDs, it seems GoDaddy really can’t catch a break.

Radix and Identity Digital also competed for the contract.

GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital

GoDaddy appears to have lost the last remnants of its Amazon back-end registry services deal.

IANA records show that GoDaddy was recently replaced by Identity Digital as the technical contact for all of the remaining 12 gTLDs it was serving.

The gTLDs in question are: .coupon, .song, .zero and the IDNs .ストア, .セール, .家電, .クラウド, .食品, .ファッション, .書籍, .ポイント and .通販, which are generic terms for things like “fashion” and “books”.

Five of the IDNs have actually launched and have been generally available for years, but they’re been phenomenally unsuccessful — the largest zone has just 146 domains in it. The remaining seven are dormant, unlaunched.

Amazon originally used GoDaddy (then Neustar) for all 54 of the gTLDs it successfully applied for back in the 2012 gTLD application round, but it switched all but 12 of them to Nominet back in 2019, where they remain today.

Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed

Amazon is set to launch not two but at least three of its dormant new gTLDs in the next few months, according to ICANN documentation.

As reported earlier this week, .talk and .fast are set to go to sunrise in August and general availability in September, and now they’ll be joined by a third: .you.

.you will enter a one-month sunrise period for trademark owners August 25, to be immediately followed by GA. There’ll likely also be a five-day Early Access Period.

The releases follow the launch of .free, .hot and .spot last month.

.TOP promises to play nice on DNS abuse

.TOP Registry is off the ICANN naughty step, almost a year after it became the first registry to be hit by a public contract-breach notice over ICANN’s latest rules on DNS abuse.

The Org took the highly unusual step yesterday of publishing a blog post drawing attention to what it clearly sees as a big Compliance win, ahead of its public meeting in Prague later this month, at which abuse will no doubt, as usual, be a key discussion topic.

ICANN said that it has been working with .TOP for months to put in systems aimed at reducing the abuse of .top domains. It posted:

.TOP Registry expressed its commitment to maintaining compliance with the DNS Abuse obligations and continuously strengthening its abuse detection and mitigation processes through newly established collaboration channels and a structured approach designed to drive ongoing enhancement. ICANN Compliance acknowledged that the remedial measures were sufficient to cure the Notice of Breach. We noted that future violations of these requirements will result in expedited compliance action, up to and including the issuance of additional Notices of Breach.

Compliance had hit .TOP with the breach notice last year over allegations that it repeatedly ignored abuse reports submitted by security researchers, and that it was ignoring Uniform Rapid Suspension notices.

Security outfit URLAbuse later revealed it was the party that had reported .TOP to ICANN.

.TOP is a Chinese registry that sells mainly via Chinese registrars, typically at under a couple bucks retail. A non-scientific perusal of its zone files reveals that the majority of the many thousands of domains it sells every day are nothing but disposable junk — random strings of characters with no meaning in any language.

While .top is far from alone in that regard, it is the most successful at the abuse-attractive low-price-high-volume business model. Its zone grew by almost 1.2 million domains in the last 12 months — the biggest growth spurt of any TLD — and it has just shy of four million domains today.

Despite this implausibly rapid growth, ICANN says that abuse reports for .top domains started falling in April and there has been a “noticeable decrease in reported abuse”.

The Org says it will “actively monitor the effectiveness of these new [.TOP] systems and processes, the Registry Operator’s abuse rankings and their compliance with the requirements.”

The registry has told ICANN it has already “mitigated” over 100,000 abusive domain names with its new systems and processes.

Launch dates for two more Amazon gTLDs revealed

Fresh from the launch of .free, .hot and .spot, Amazon has pencilled in launch dates for two more of its backlog of dormant gTLDs.

The company has told ICANN it plans to launch .talk and .fast later this year, with sunrise coming in August.

It also seems to be planning to start using .audible, one of its dot-brands, but that would not be available for public registration.

.fast and .talk are set to enter their sunrise periods from August 26 to September 25 this year, according to ICANN documentation. General availability would follow immediately.

If Amazon follows the same playbook as it did with the three gTLDs it launched last month, there would also be a five-day Early Access Period, with premium prices for early adopters.

The May launches have yet to set the world alight, perhaps in part due to their pricing (ranging from $30 to $60 retail), with best-performer .free’s zone file containing just 1,150 domains so far.

Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks

Amazon Registry’s launch of three gTLDs last week saw some registrants pay premium prices for .hot domain hacks.

Zone file data shows domains such as moons.hot and slings.hot were registered towards to the end of the five-day Early Access Period, with the registrant likely paying close to a thousand bucks for each.

cums.hot, longs.hot, moneys.hot, mugs.hot, pots.hot and ups.hot have all been registered, seeming by a broad range of registrants, at regular general availability prices since EAP closed May 17.

The EAP was lightly subscribed, if the zones are a guide. There were a handful of defensive registrations towards the end of the week, along with a few context-appropriate keywords like piping.hot.

.hot launched at the same time as .free and .spot, which don’t seem to have the same domain hack opportunities. Most EAP regs there were either defensives or keywords. Names like speak.free and live.free were registered.

As of today, .free is doing the best of the three, with 931 names in its zone, followed by .spot with 373 and .hot with 309.

.hot is for hookers? Amazon’s first premium regs revealed

Amazon Registry made three new gTLDs available to non-trademark-holders on Monday, and so far a handful registrants have taken up the offer of premium Early Access Period pricing.

The five-day EAPs for .free, .hot and .spot see prices start high and decrease each day until May 17, when they’ll settle at standard general availability pricing.

While the wholesale prices have not been published by Amazon, the registrar 101domain was retailing them for $6,299 on day one, $3,299 on day two, $1,399 on day three, $799 on day four, and $199 on day five.

GA pricing for .hot at 101domain will be $59.99, while .free will be $44.99 and .spot will be $29.99.

The early adopter(s) in .hot seem to be viewing it as a sex-related TLD along the lines of .xxx, .sex or .sexy. All the day-one registrations (in multiple languages) look set to be used for escort services.

The domains that popped up for the first time in the May 13 zone files were:

be.free
bible.free
sql.free

acompanhantes.hot
escort.hot
escorts.hot
incontri.hot
prepagos.hot
trans.hot

high.spot
hub.spot

The only new domain in the May 14 zones appears to be live.free. They’re not exactly flying off the shelves so far.

Because the zone files are generated at midnight UTC and Amazon’s EAP daily price-increase cut-off is 1259 UTC, it’s not possible to say for sure how much each registrant paid for their domain names.

Two deadbeat registrars get their ICANN marching orders

ICANN has terminated the registrar accreditation agreements of two Chinese companies, which appear to be under common ownership, because they didn’t pay their bills.

EJEE Group Beijing and VIP Internet Industry are both losing their contracts, effective later this month. Both have common contact details, apparently run by the same person who had another registrar terminated in 2017.

EJEE does its business at category-killer domain domain.cn, though the registration storefront appears to be broken. VIP Internet’s web site appears to be down entirely.

While both companies have sold thousands of domains in their time, both have had just one or two gTLD domains under management for the last 12 months, according to my records. No registrants will be affected, in other words.

ICANN seems to have been chasing the registrars for their overdue fees since March 2023, over two years ago, according to the termination notices.

DotMusic has sold a lot of names, but not many are turned on

DotMusic, the company that started selling .music domains seven months ago, has had a relatively successful launch, but one in four domains sold have not yet gone live.

The latest registry transaction reports show that there were just over 30,000 registered .music domains at the end of January. Registry CEO Constantine Roussos tells us it’s over 31,000 today.

“We have more registrations than any community TLD and it is not even close,” Roussos said.

It’s certainly true that .music is already the largest generic-term Spec 12 Community gTLD from the 2012 application round.

But while 31,000 in six months is a good start for a 2012-round gTLD, there are currently only about 7,500 domains in the .music zone file, showing that about three quarters of names have not been activated.

It’s not the lowest unactivated domains rate in gTLDs — only about 15% of .xxx’s registered names are in its zone file, for example — but it’s pretty low. The similarly-sized .baby has about 84% utilization.

A low utilization rate usually means a high proportion of defensive registrations — registrants have no intention of ever using their domains but want to keep them out of the hands of others — but something different might be going on here.

As a Community gTLD, .music has extra hoops to jump through before registrants can activate their domains.

They have to have their identity and nexus to the music industry verified and obtain a special code called a Music ID from the registry, which can also be used for future registrations.

Roussos said that “the majority of the registrants have never owned a domain name before, which is great news for us”. He added: “My other guess is that most just wait until they are ready to use the domain to get verified”.

He said that many registrants are choosing to take advantage of a feature called SmartPage, which gives bands a template-driven profile page containing basic information and links to their socials and such.

.med is a deeply weird gTLD, but it wants to be more normal

Medistry, the .med registry with a really strange business model, is looking to normalize its practices and start competing with the cluster of healthcare-related gTLDs already on the market.

The gTLD launched in 2016 and had almost 42,000 domains under management at the last count, which may sound like a pretty decent showing for a 2012-round niche registry (comparable to the likes of .beauty and .chat).

But there are a few caveats. For starters, only one non-registry .med domain has been indexed by Google, and it redirects to a .com web site.

Delve into the .med zone file, and you’ll discover that almost all of those 42,000 domains are 12 characters long and each comprises entirely numbers and hyphens. Doesn’t sound very sexy, does it?

Furthermore, delve into the Whois, and you’ll discover that all of those domains are registered via the registry’s in-house registrar, Name Share, to an entity affiliated with the registry itself.

A couple of years ago, having not sold more than a handful of .med domain names (I’ll get to the reasons for that in a moment), Medistry seems to have decided to reinvent .med as a directory for medicines.

In the US, all human medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration are given a National Drug Code, a 10-digit unique identifier that the manufacturers are required to print on the packaging.

So, the domain name 55150-250-50.med refers to a bupivacaine hydrochloride injection, a surgical anaesthetic made by Eugia US LLC. Almost all .med domains follow this three-part NDC structure.

The domains seem to have been registered in service of Trust.med, another entity affiliated with the registry, which says it offers supply chain management services to the US healthcare industry.

Why the DNS is the best place to store this NDC information isn’t clear to me. All the .med names I checked came back NXDOMAIN and were marked as pendingDelete in the Whois despite being months away from expiration.

So… Plan C? Sell .med domains to any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants one, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Medistry says that, as of now:

A registrant of a .med domain name can be an individual or organization. All available domain names in .med are approved for registration on a first come, first serve basis through .med accredited registrars. .med domain names can also be purchased in the domain name aftermarket.

That’s hell and gone from the mission outlined in Medistry’s 2012 new gTLD application and its current Registry Agreement with ICANN, both of which outline some of the harshest registration restrictions of any TLD.

Its current ICANN contract states, in the Public Interest Commitments:

The lone method of domain name allocation in the TLD will be by Request for Proposal (RFP) under guidelines, rules and criteria as set forth by the Advisory Board in its sole discretion.

RFP for domain name registration in the TLD will be reviewed for approval by the Advisory Board, in its sole discretion, independent of Registry Operator.

PICs are enforceable by ICANN Compliance under the rarely used PIC Dispute Resolution Process, should there be a view that a registry is violating the contract.

Could Medistry be heading into stormy waters with Compliance? The company does have form in that regard — it’s owned by the same people who run .jobs registry Employ Media.

Employ Media got into a protracted fight with ICANN in 2012 over a service called Universe.jobs, which saw it register 40,000 generic .jobs domains to a close partner in order to turn the gTLD into a structured taxonomical jobs board.

ICANN thought the service was a breach of the .jobs RA and the two parties ended up in arbitration. ICANN eventually let Universe.jobs go ahead but it fizzled out a few years later when Employ Media came to blows with its partner.

Is history repeating itself with .med’s sudden change of business model?

Medistry says that full general availability for .med names will begin on September 2, but it’s telling registrars (pdf) they can “Pre-Register any domain to guarantee registration beginning on September 2” by emailing them a list of names.

It’s also looking to on-board more registrars. As of the end of January, the only registrars to ever sell a .med domain were owned by the registry. It uses Nominet as its back-end.

.med would compete against the likes of .doctor, .surgery, .health and .clinic.