India offers dollar regs to celebrate independence

Indian ccTLD registry NIXI has announced a limited-time sub-$1 promo on new .in registrations — INR 75 in local currency — to celebrate the country’s imminent 75th anniversary of independence.

The organization says it has reduced its registry fee to INR 25, and registrars that signed up had to agree to an INR 75 retail price, which works out to about $0.95 for the first year.

The promo runs from August 5 to 22, overlapping with Independence Day, which in India in August 15.

The promo also covers India’s multitude of local-script IDN ccTLDs.

There’s no list of participating registrars on NIXI’s web site, and the availability check appears to be broken, but most of the larger international registrars I checked are not offering sub-$1 prices.

.in back-end GoDaddy is currently selling for a discount, but it’s about $4. Namecheap is selling for $0.95.

In an apparent deviation from earlier controversial policy, NIXI is stating: “There is no limitation on the number of domains which can be booked by a registrant.”

auDA updates on 2LD .au sales

Registrations of second-level domains in .au led to strong growth in the second quarter, according to auDA.

The number of 2LDs registered between the namespace opening up March 24 and the end of June was more than 170,000 the registry said in its latest quarterly report.

There were 218,886 newly registered names in the second quarter, which ended with 3,603,924 total names under management, auDA said.

From launch and for the next few months, all 2LDs are reserved for owners of the matching 3LDs in for example .com.au, so it seems adoption is still quite slow.

In .uk, which liberalized its own zone several years ago, there were 1,370,488 registered 2LDs, compared to 9,777,315 3LDs, at the end of July, registry stats show.

Now Nokia scraps a dot-brand

Finnish tech company Nokia has become the latest company to get rid of a dot-brand gTLD.

It’s asked ICANN to terminate the contract for the IDN .诺基亚 ( .xn--jlq61u9w7b), which is the Chinese transliteration of “Nokia”.

Like .nokia itself, the TLD is not currently in use. Nokia has not asked ICANN to terminate .nokia (or, at least, ICANN has not published such a notice).

Other companies that chose to terminate their Chinese IDNs include Richemont and Volkswagen. In Richemont’s case it was followed by all its other gTLDs.

InternetNZ appoints new CEO

Vivien Maidaborn has been selected as the new CEO of InternetNZ, New Zealand’s ccTLD registry.

She’s replacing Jordan Carter, who quit earlier this year for a top policy job at Australian registry auDA, and interim chief Andrew Cushen, who reportedly had put himself forward for the role on a permanent basis.

Maidaborn was most recently in a leadership role for Unicef in Vietnam. She’s expected to take over from Cushen in October.

InternetNZ is not only in the middle of a back-end transition to an EPP-based back-end based on technology from its Canadian counterpart CIRA, but also in a process of “becoming a Te Tiriti o Waitangi centric organisation”, a reference to the country’s foundational Treaty of Waitangi.

The press release announcing the appointment has a sprinkling of Māori terms that will most likely baffle foreigners, but the gist seems to be that the organization is trying to make itself more responsive to input from Māori citizens, whose ancestors landed on the islands hundreds of years before European settlers and got rather badly treated under British rule.

Looks like XYZ bought another gTLD

XYZ.com appears to have added the 34th string to its swelling stable of gTLDs.

ICANN records suggest that it’s taken over the contract for .lat, a TLD aimed at Latin America.

While no contract reassignment documentation has been published, the transfer of .lat from ECOM-LAC, the Uruguay-based registry, to XYZ is on ICANN’s list of contract movements.

.lat’s addressable market is the over 600 million people in the Latin American region, not to mention the global diaspora. Names sell for as little as $25 per year.

But it only has about 5,500 domains under management right now, seven years after launch.

In theory, it would compete with .latino, but that appears to be a dodgy defensive delegation, never launched, by satellite TV company Dish.

Bugatti dumps dot-brand under new owners

Bugatti, which makes incredibly expensive limited-edition sports cars, is dropping its dot-brand.

The French company asked ICANN to release it from its .bugatti registry contract about a month ago, according to ICANN documents.

Bugatti entered new ownership last November, under a joint venture between Rimac and Porsche, and recently reportedly underwent a branding overhaul.

It seems the dot-brand had no place under the new marketing strategy.

Its previous owner had been Volkswagen, which still has a (unused) dot-brand, despite dumping its Chinese-script equivalent. But Porsche had been an opponent of the new gTLD program back in 2011.

.bugatti had actually been used, albeit lightly. A couple of live, non-redirecting sites still remain.

Over 100 dot-brands have terminated their contracts to date.

Verisign announces ANOTHER price increase as regs slide

Verisign posted a rare decrease in its .com/.net registered name base in the second quarter, but said it is going to raise its .net prices next year anyway.

The company also massively slashed its growth outlook for domain sales this year.

The annual cost of a .net name will go up 10%, the maximum permissible under its contract with ICANN, to $9.92 from February 1 next year, the registry said

Registrants will as usual be able to lock-in the current renewal fee of $9.02 for up to 10 years if they renew before the hike kicks in.

It’s the first .net price increase since 2018. The TLD has been stagnating in volume terms for several years, due no doubt in part to behavioral changes following the introduction of new gTLDs starting in late 2013.

The news came as Verisign reported that its domain base shrunk during Q2.

The company ended June with 174.3 million names under management, up 2.2% over a year earlier but down 350,000 domains compared to the end of Q1.

The split was 161.1 million for .com and 13.2 million for .net — that’s a sequential decrease of 200,000 for .com and a decrease of 200,000 for .net. Both rounded, of course.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts tonight that renewals were affected by a great many first-time registrations from China not renewing. General post-pandemic and macro-economic factors also played a role, he said.

The preliminary renewal rate was 75.9% compared to 76.0% a year earlier, but the number of new regs was down to 10.1 million from 11.7 million over the same period.

Verisign reported Q2 revenue up 6.8% on a year ago at $352 million, with net income of $167 million compared to $148 million. Its operating margin swelled to 67.1% percent from 64.7%.

Bidzos told analysts that the company is cutting its registered name growth prediction for the year to between 0.5% and 1.5%, a huge decrease from the already-downgraded estimate of 1.75% and 3.5% it made after the first quarter.

He said that he expects Q3 and Q4 to go much the same way as Q2.

Bidzos said he thinks the current factors affecting regs are a bump in the road and he expects things to stabilize over time.

UPDATE 2148 UTC — The article was updated to correct the comparison of the decrease in .com/.net regs.

CentralNic signs Greenland deal

CentralNic says it has won a contract to supply registry management software to Greenland’s ccTLD.

It appears to be a software licensing deal rather than an outsourced registry back-end contract.

Greenland’s .gl domain is management by local telco Tusass, which awarded the contract.

Greenland is one of three countries comprising Denmark. CentralNic also supports .fo, for the Faroe Islands.

It’s not known how many names are registered in .gl, but with a population of barely 56,000 the number of local registrations is likely to be tiny.

The are no residency requirements to register .gl names, however, and prices are .com-competitive.

Perhaps its best-known domain was Google’s discontinued link-shortener service goo.gl.

Early “dot-brand” adopter wants to scrap its gTLD

One of the first adopters of the dot-brand gTLD concept, which has an active portfolio of resolving domains, has asked ICANN to tear up its registry contract.

The Australian Cancer Research Foundation said it no longer wishes to operate .cancerresearch, which it has used since 2014.

It’s a bit of a strange, possibly unique, situation, which may explain why its termination request, submitted in April, is only now being published by ICANN.

Technically, .cancerresearch was more like a closed generic than a dot-brand. It did not have a trademark on the string or the Specification 13 exceptions in its registry contract, which would make it a dot-brand.

Instead, ACRF had the TLD delegated, registered a bunch of resolving names to itself, and never officially launched. There was never even a sunrise period.

Pretty significant loophole in the rules for the 2012 application round if you ask me.

But ICANN is treating .cancerresearch as if it was a dot-brand anyway. Because nobody except ACRF ever owned any domains there, there’s no need to transition to a new registry to protect registrants.

This also means nobody else will be able to apply for the same string for two years, assuming an application window opens in that period.

ACRF still has live non-redirecting web sites on domains such as lung.cancerresearch, breast.cancerresearch and donate.cancerresearch.

It’s the first gTLD termination request since last October.

Verisign to mandate 2FA for .com registrars

Over 2,000 registrars are likely to be affected by a new Verisign policy making two-factor authentication mandatory when logging into the company’s registrar portal.

ICANN has given the preliminary nod to a Verisign proposal to make 2FA, which has been available on an optional basis for over a decade, mandatory.

Voluntary adoption of the security feature has been light since it was first introduced in 2009. According to Verisign’s Registry Services Evaluation Process request (pdf) only around 200 registrars currently use it.

There were 2,446 active .com registrars at the last count. The RSEP also applies to .net and .name.

The 2FA system requires registrars to enter a one-time password, in addition to their usual credentials, whenever they log in to their accounts.

The change only applies to registrars logging into Verisign’s web site to manage their accounts, not to registrants who have .com domains. It does not apply to under-the-hood EPP transactions.

The company is hoping to implement the change pretty damn quick — its June 30 RSEP states that it will start to give registrars a 30-day noticed period the following day, before ICANN had even formally approved the change.

ICANN approval (pdf) came yesterday, so presumably 2FA will become mandatory in a matter of days.