Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours

A screwup by MarkMonitor and GoDaddy was responsible for a two-hour outage affecting Zoom’s videoconferencing services yesterday, according to the company.

The widely used services were offline between 1825 and 2012 UTC yesterday because GoDaddy Registry, apparently acting under MarkMonitor’s instructions, shut down the zoom.us domain.

Screenshots posted to social media show zoom.us returning an NXDOMAIN error in web browsers. In-progress conference calls were reportedly shut off mid-stream.

Zoom said in a statement:

On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, network failure or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

It’s not entirely clear what is meant by “server block”, but it sounds consistent with a serverHold EPP status, where a registry prevents a domain from resolving in the DNS.

GoDaddy is the registry for .us domains. MarkMonitor is a hands-on corporate registrar dealing primarily with high-value brand clients.

Zoom is the incredibly popular conferencing service that grew to such popularity during the pandemic one could almost argue that it could be considered critical infrastructure.

While two hours downtime is hardly the end of the world, it’s still one hell of a screwup.

Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”

Google is going to stop using country-code TLDs for its web sites around the world.

The company said today that “country-level domains are no longer necessary” because it’s become so good at localization that it doesn’t need to have search users visit their local ccTLD domain to figure out where they are.

All of its ccTLD sites will start redirecting to google.com over the coming months, Google said in a blog post. The only impact users will see is having to re-enter search preferences, it said.

The move is a bit of a blow, albeit a bearable one, to ccTLD registries, which will no longer have their brand associated with the internet’s most-popular web service. Google.com is already the most-visited domain in the world.

.ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital.

The company took over management of Anguilla’s ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post.

The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Namecheap and went daily.

It’s also put .ai into its DropZone system, so domains that don’t sell at auction can be bid on by registrars through a centralized registry-managed process rather than dropping immediately,

Identity Digital also said that its regular registration revenue has increased 60% compared to last year.

Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio

Financial services company Prudential Financial has dumped one of its three dot-brand gTLDs, which it was not using.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its contract to run .pramerica, which, despite the name, provides investment services to the Indian market. The subsidiary uses a .in domain for its web site.

While .pramerica has never had a registered domain in the eight years it’s been active, Prudential has two other gTLDs — .pru and .prudential — which are in active use.

Neither is used as the primary domains for their respective brands — both use exact-match .com names — but both have live corporate sites under domains such as pr.pru and stock.pru.

Prudential’s gTLDs all run on GoDaddy’s back-end registry.

WordPress buys Canadian, swaps CentralNic for CIRA

Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and the .blog gTLD registry, says it’s switching to Hello Registry from its current provider.

Hello Registry is a joint venture of two like-minded national ccTLD non-profits: Canadian (.ca) registry CIRA and Dutch (.nl) registry SIDN. It was launched last November, having been developed under the name CIRA Registry Platform.

Automattic is currently running .blog, which has about 300,000 domains and added about 50,000 in the last year, on CentralNic, the registry services provider owned by Team Internet.

The company has told its registrants that it does not expect any disruption from the migration, saying in a blog post:

We’ve been working closely with our registrar partners since November 2024 to ensure a smooth transition, with the migration scheduled for the end of April, 2025.

It added that it believes the move will create “new opportunities for growth and innovation”.

UPDATE: Automattic has got in touch to ask for a clarification. A spokesperson said:

the decision to migrate .blog was made by Knock Knock WHOIS There (KKWT), which is the official registry operator for .blog. While KKWT is a subsidiary of Automattic, it operates independently as required by ICANN. So, this wasn’t a decision made by WordPress or WordPress.com

So…
.

.co deal worth $77 million up for grabs

The Colombian government has put the contract to run .co out for bidding, and it looks like the successful registry could make as much as $77 million over the lifetime of the deal.

GoDaddy currently runs .co through its subsidiary .CO Internet, which it acquired when in bought Neustar five years ago. The government’s RFP does not rule out the incumbent reapplying despite some friction in the past.

It’s not simply a back-end registry services deal. The successful registry will have to be the public face of .co too, handling front-of-house services and marketing as well.

Extrapolating from some figures and formulas in the RFP, it seems GoDaddy’s share (19% of the total revenue) has worked out to about $7.7 million a year on average over the last five years. The new contract would be a 10-year deal.

But is .co on the decline? According to the RFP, the were 3,217,570 .co domains in January this year, down from 3.4 million in 2022 and 3.3 million in 2023. Numbers for 2024 were not included.

That downward trend may merely be the post-Covid slump experienced by many TLDs. Indeed, when the current contract was signed in 2020, there were just 2.3 million .co domains under management, so GoDaddy’s done a pretty good job of growing the namespace.

Lancaster bags up its dot-brand

A French leather goods company is trashing its lightly-used dot-brand gTLD.

Lancaster has told ICANN that it wants to terminate its Registry Agreement for .lancaster.

The company added half a dozen names to the gTLD in 2016 — things like bag.lancaster and fashion.lancaster — but they always just redirected to its primary web site at lancaster.com.

Lancaster used AFNIC as its back-end registry services provider.

The string “Lancaster” has many uses, from other brands to geographic locations, so it’s not impossible .lancaster might return in another guise in a future new gTLD application round.

Google readying its next batch of gTLD launches?

Three more of Google’s stockpile of long-dormant gTLDs showed signs of activity recently, strongly suggesting the company may be preparing to launch them.

The domains get.eat, get.fly and get.here were all registered February 20, according to zone files and Whois records. While none yet resolve, Google typically uses “get” domains for its customer-facing registry web sites.

Other than nic.[tld] and domaintest.[tld], none of the three had previous registrations apart from .here, which had on.here registered back in 2016. That domain resolves for me, but to an infinitely reloading blank page.

Google is currently fresh from the launch of .channel, which went into general availability February 11 and currently has 1,451 names in its zone file.

Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications

Nova Registry, which runs .link, has announced it plans to apply for 200 new gTLDs when ICANN opens up the next application window about a year from now.

It’s the first time in this round a company has announced plans to build a huge TLD portfolio. It would cost around $45.4 million in application fees alone, if ICANN’s guide price of $227,000 stays true.

It would make Nova the second-largest applicant by gTLD count to date, dwarfed only by the over 300 Donuts applied for in 2012. It would be about twice as large as the 101 Google applied for last time.

In the 2026 round, only Unstoppable Domains has announced a large number of applications — more than 50 — but those are all with partners that would presumably eventually become the contracted registry.

It’s not entirely clear from today’s announcement whether Nova is financing this project, which it calls SuperNova200, alone, or whether it’s looking for business partners.

“We will apply for 200 new Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs),” the registry says. “A new breed of gTLDs to drive innovation, competition, and consumer choice while enhancing the utility of the DNS.”

Nova entered the market in 2022 when it acquired .link from UNR. It appears to be ultimately owned by domainer Yonatan Belousov and is managed by ICM Registry alum Vaughn Liley.

Registry makes .ai an option for Koreans

South Korea’s ccTLD registry is seeking to borrow from the success of repurposed ccTLDs, including .ai, with the release of four new third-level namespaces under .kr.

This week local registry KISA started selling names in .ai.kr, .it.kr, .me.kr, and .io.kr, following the growth of the ccTLDs .ai, .it, .me and .io, which have all seen sales because they mean other stuff in English as well as being geographic identifiers.

The company acknowledged its inspiration for the new products in a recent press release:

Recently, as overseas country domains such as ‘.ai (Anguilla)’, ‘.io (British Indian Ocean Territory)’, ‘.it (Italy)’, and ‘.me (Montenegro)’ have been actively used among the AI ​​field, startups, IT companies, and bloggers, a policy was developed to allow our citizens to use the domains they want by creating a new 3-level country domain that reflects the latest trends.

The domains are only available to registrants with a presence in Korea.

KISA said the new namespaces are priced more competitively than the two-level equivalents, with .ai.kr selling for the KRW equivalent of $14 a year, compared to .ai’s $70.