More gloom predicted for .com

Verisign is predicting more shrinkage at .com and .net in 2025, despite a few notes of optimism from its CEO.

The company said last night that its two flagship gTLDs shrunk by a combined 3.7 million domains in 2024, a 2.1% decrease, as I flagged up a couple weeks ago, and that its growth this year will be between negative 2.3% and negative 0.3%.

The quarterly loss was around 500,000 domains. Verisign ended the quarter with 169 million domains under management.

CEO Jim Bidzos again told analysts that the shrinkage was partly due to weakness in China and partly due to American registrars concentrating on profit margins over customer acquisition.

Growth was positive in the EMEA region, he said, without quantifying it.

Bidzos said that marketing programs the company recently launched show early signs of adoption by registrars, and that he expects registrars to refocus on customer acquisition as part of a cyclical trend.

He pointed to the fact that two registrars — presumably GoDaddy and Squarespace — have taken out pricey Super Bowl TV ads this weekend as an encouraging sign.

He said that Verisign is “considering looking at” applying for new gTLDs next year and is “looking at the potential for applications”.

The company reported Q4 net income of $191 million, down from $265 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 3.9% at $395 million.

For the full year, Verisign had net income of $786 million versus $818 million in 2023, on revenue that was up 4.3% at $1.56 billion.

PIR to join GlobalBlock, but its crown jewel won’t

Public Interest Registry is set to join GlobalBlock, the multi-TLD trademark blocking network, following approval of a series of ICANN registry contract amendments.

It will become easily the largest registry operator, by domains under management, to sign up for the service. But its crown jewel, .org, will not be included, I’m told.

.charity, .foundation, .gives, .giving, .ngo and .ong, along with four translations in non-Latin scripts, will become part of GlobalBlock, meaning trademark owners will get to block their brands rather than defensively register them, saving a bit of money.

But the protections will not extend to .org, which with over 11 million domains is the third-largest gTLD. This is probably quite telling.

GlobalBlock says it currently blocks domains in 634 “extensions”, by which it means a mix of gTLDs, ccTLDs, and second-level domains in the consensus DNS, as well as some newer blockchain-based namespaces.

.free domains to finally arrive as Amazon reveals three gTLD launches

Amazon Registry has revealed launch dates for three of its long-dormant gTLDs, and they have the potential to be the most popular of its patchy portfolio.

.free, .hot and .spot are to go to sunrise April 2, according to a notice on Amazon’s web site and paperwork filed with ICANN.

The Trademark Claims period, which pretty much always coincides with the start of general availability, is set for May 12.

Details of pricing and any possible registration restrictions have not been published.

All three gTLDs have been in the root since 2016, just sitting there doing nothing. Amazon has 54 gTLDs in total, 10 of which are dot-brands, but most of the generics remain stubbornly unlaunched.

Its half-dozen Japanese-script domains have been around the longest, but its biggest success to date has been .bot, which has about 14,000 names in its zone file.

Amazon launched .deal and .now last year but the former has yet to hit 10,000 names and the former still hasn’t hit 1,000.

Amazon had to pay off four other applicants for the right to run .free.

Six more gTLDs shown the door, five may be auctioned

There are to be six fewer gTLDs on the internet, after ICANN terminated its registry contracts with two companies.

Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have been cancelled, after a lengthy compliance process, while Kerry Trading Co self-terminated .kerrylogistics.

Despite being contracted for a decade, none of AGIT’s TLDs had ever meaningfully launched. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of registrations.

The registry had stopped paying CoCCA, its back-end provider, bringing it into serious breach of its Registry Agreements. It had also failed to pay its ICANN fees.

According to ICANN correspondence, after it entered into mediation with AGIT last August it came up with a secret term sheet to give the company a way out, but it breached the terms of that deal too.

All five were terminated over the Christmas period, but they could return if ICANN decides to sell them off to the highest bidder.

ICANN told the company it “will conduct an assessment and make its determination whether to transition operation of the .nowruz gTLD to a successor registry operator.”

But they all look like poison chalices. They’re all related in some way to Iran, and could raise cultural or legal sensitivities.

.shia is related to the branch of Islam, .pars is related to the language and culture of Iran and .nowruz is the Persian new year holiday.

.tci, which I can easily imagine being picked up and repurposed by a discount-names portfolio registry, was supposed to be a dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran and همراه. is the brand of its mobile phone subsidiary, meaning something like “companion”.

Neither was technically a Spec 13 dot-brand, which is usually enough to for ICANN to rule out a redelegation.

But even if ICANN decides to sell off these five dead strings to another registry under the Registry Transition Process, there’s no guarantee that will ever actually happen.

Org decided to auction failed gTLD .wed almost five years ago and there’s been no movement on that ever since. Failed .desi is in a similar situation.

.kerrylogistics was a Spec 13, and will not be transitioned, after Hong Kong based delivery company Kerry unilaterally told ICANN it no longer wished to run the TLD.

Kerry has five remaining dot-brands, including .kerryhotels and .kerryproperties, that it does not use but does not seem to want to kill off just yet.

These are the TLD growers and shrinkers of 2024 (part two)

Following on from the annual ccTLD growth statistics DI published last week, today we’ll look at the gTLDs, where .shop was by far the biggest volume winner and .com was by far the biggest loser.

GMO Registry’s .shop added 1,315,000 names to its zone file in 2024, ending the year with 3,470,000 domains. It’s now the second-largest of the 2012 batch of gTLDs, after .xyz.

The growth seems to have been pretty consistent across the year and is presumably due to the low first-year prices offered by many registrars. At least 10 registrars offer .shop for under a dollar currently, one as low as $0.27, though around $25 appears to be the floor for renewals.

.xyz, .lol, .bond and .sbs recorded similar growth stats, up 495,000, 487,000, 468,000 and 459,000 domains to end the year with 3,801,000, 601,000, 710,000 and 824,000 respectively.

Of the 750-odd gTLDs (excluding dot-brands) for which I have stats, only about 200 grew by more than one domain per day. About 60 grew by five-figure amounts. About 280 shrank. The rest were either still unlaunched or recorded negligible growth.

Only about 80 currently have over 50,000 names in the zones which, if the number matched domains under management, would be the threshold for triggering ICANN’s per-transaction fees.

At the other end of the table, .com was by far the biggest volume loser, down 3,769,000 zone file domains to end the period at 153,856,000. Verisign has blamed economic factors in China and price increases at American registrars for the decline. Verisign’s .net lost 424,000 names to end with 12,485,000.

ShortDot’s .cfd, a stable sister to .sbs and .bond at the top end of the table, lost over three quarters of its domains over the course of the year, ending December down 782,000 at 238,000 names, showing that domains sold for pennies tend not to stick around very long.

The next five shrinkers were .click, .space, .buzz, .live and .bio, which were down 94,000, 72,000, 43,000, 41,000 and 30,000 to end the year with 471,000, 310,000, 316,000, 545,000 and 48,000 domains respectively.

.social, .gay, .win, .mobi, .monster, .website and .biz all saw declines in the low five figures in the period.

Figures in this article are sourced from domain counts in zone files collected on January 1 2024 and 2025, rounded to the nearest thousand.

These are the TLD growers and shrinkers of 2024 (part one)

With all the excitement and concern surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence, the smart money might have been on .ai being the fastest-growing ccTLD in 2024. It wasn’t.

That honor instead goes to Russia’s .ru, which grew by the largest number of domains last year of any of the ccTLDs that have so far published statistics.

.ru grew by almost 388,000 domains to end the year at around 5,817,000, according to the registry. The matching Cyrillic ccTLD, .РФ, declined a little from 768,000 domains to 760,000.

Anguilla’s .ai, currently being re-homed on an Identity Digital back-end grew by just over 244,000 domains between late December 2023 and January 2 2025, according to registry stats.

After Russia, Indonesian ccTLD .id added the most domains in 2024, growing by almost 289,000 and breaking into seven figures in November to end the year with about 1,215,000 names.

Turkiye’s .tr is next on the list. Its second-level liberalization saw a sharp increase in registrations mid-year, and it ended the year with 1.283.000 names, up 271,000 over the period.

Portugal and Brazil (.pt and .br) are the only other two ccTLDs to report six-figure increases so far, with growth of 149,000 and 134,000 to 1,930,000 and 5,372,000 domains respectively.

.fr (France), .ir (Iran), .pl (Poland), .de (Germany), .my (Malaysia), .ca (Canada), .vn (Vietnam), .jp (Japan), .cz (Czechia) and .hu (Hungary) all reported growth measured in the five digits for the year.

At the other end of the table, the UK saw the biggest shrinkage in terms of registered domains in 2024, with .uk (second and third levels combined) down about 472,000 to end December at 10,261,000 domains.

The decline was primarily at the third level (such as the popular .co.uk), which lost 371,000 names compared to 100,000 at the second level. The third-level total is now 8,967,852 — below nine million for the first time in 15 years.

The ccTLD reporting the second-biggest loss was .nl, which lost 106,000 names to end the year with 6,192,000. The TLD has been on a downwards trajectory since its peak of 6.3 million domains in mid-2023.

Ukraine’s up next, reporting a 57,000-name decline to 458,000 at the end of December. Much as it’s hard to not speculate that international sanctions are behind the rise of .ru, one wonders whether the ongoing Russian invasion is not behind the decline of .ua. Entrepreneurial-aged men have more existential concerns right now.

.ar (Argentina), .dk (Denmark), .kr (South Korea), .at (Austria), .se (Sweden), .eu (European Union), .be (Belgium) and .nu (Niue, mainly sold in Sweden) all saw five-figure declines in their reg totals over the year.

.hk (Hong Kong), .cl (Chile), .it (Italy), .il (Israel), .mx (Mexico) and .ie (Ireland) all also saw modest dips in their totals.

About three quarters of the ccTLDs for which I have data were up in the year, with the rest going down.

I should note that this prose league table cannot be considered comprehensive. Many ccTLD registries with substantial DUM (eg China, the US) will not report their year-end numbers for months and others (eg .tv, .co, .in, .me) typically do not report numbers at all.

In addition, strict apples-to-apples comparisons between ccTLDs may not be fair, given the differing ways registries calculate their totals.

New gTLD use cases not much use

ICANN has come in for periodic criticism over the last decade or so for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in public about its new gTLD program, but this time around it’s trying to do something about it.

New gTLD program participants have said that ICANN should have thrown more of its substantial resources into marketing the program, raising the profile of both the application period and the availability of new gTLDs when they go live.

But, under community guidance for the 2026 application window, Org started promoting the program earlier this year, with the publication of a “Next Round Champion’s Toolkit” web site containing ready-made marketing materials that consultants and gTLD service providers are free to use to reach out to their respective communities or sales prospects.

The latest component of this effort is a batch of 13 “use case” documents, each covering a specific gTLD from the 2012 round, compiled by ICANN, “each providing a compelling example of how different types of organizations use gTLDs”.

ICANN was wise to avoid calling them “case studies”. They’re pretty lightweight, with not [m]any particularly useful insights or actionable nuggets of advice. A cynic might summarize the 13 documents thus:

Hey, did you know .CEO/.SECURITY/.BANK exists? It really does! Here’s barely 500 words of elevator-pitch fluff from the registry’s PR folk, presented in the format of one of those glossy, double-sided, one-page inserts you find in a conference schwag bag and toss into your hotel room trash can unread when trying to reduce the weight of your carry-on.

Six out of the 13 use cases are generics run by XYZ Registry. Five are big-C “Community” gTLDs (including the geographic/linguistic niche offerings .gal, .lat and .bzh). Microsoft is the only dot-brand registry represented.

Notably, given how much emphasis ICANN has been putting on its goal to expand outreach efforts in under-served regions (op-eds and press releases have started popping up in places like India and Nigeria recently), there are no IDN gTLD use cases yet. And all the use cases are in English.

Still, I expect the use cases could be useful to Next Round “Champions” in some scenarios, certainly not as later-stage decision support but rather as part of an arsenal of foot-in-the-door introductory materials aimed at prospects utterly unaware that new gTLDs exist.

Defensive dot-brands are renewing, making ICANN millions

Companies that have not used their dot-brand gTLDs in a decade are nevertheless renewing their registry contracts with ICANN, leading to a situation where even ICANN seems to be benefiting directly from defensive registrations.

In just the last month or so, the registries behind .delta, .cipriani, .gallup, .icbc, .frontier, .alibaba, .taobao and others have renewed their Registry Agreements for a second 10-year term, despite having never registered a single second-level domain name.

Far more dormant dot-brands have renewed their contracts this year than have voluntarily terminated them.

According to my database, there are 116 dot-brand gTLDs today that have only ever registered their obligatory nic.[brand] domain and nothing else. That’s from a total of 369 dot-brands still live in the DNS.

Given that the absolute minimum a registry has to pay ICANN is its $25,000 annual registry fee — rising to $25,800 on January 1 — it looks like ICANN is making about $3 million per year, a couple of percent of its annual budget, from defensive dot-brands.

Registrar and back-end registry services partners are of course also making revenue from these unused brand gTLDs, but the terms of those contracts are typically not public.

There are any number of reasons why dormant dot-brands may renew their RAs. They may still be playing wait-and-see, they may be spooked by the looming 2026 application round, or they may just have an aggressive BLOCK EVERYTHING brand management strategy.

Identity Digital offers free domain trials through LinkedIn

Identity Digital says it is to offer its services via a partnership with LinkedIn.

The company said in a press release it will offer a three-month trial of the web site bundle offered by registrar subsidiary Name.com, to people who sign up for LinkedIn Premium, as one of the service’s “perks”.

The trial, which includes domain, hosting, and email, renews at $99 for the first year before reverting to the regular $289 annual price, the company said.

Other trial perks offered by LinkedIn Premium include a mindfulness app and Audible, which provides audiobooks and podcasts.

The new gTLD Next Round is really happening as two ICANN programs go live

There’s no going back now. After over a decade of politicking and policy development, ICANN has finally opened the doors to companies that want to participate in the new gTLD program’s Next Round.

You can’t apply for a gTLD yet, but if you think you will and you want it on the cheap, you can now apply to the Applicant Support Program. And if you’re a registry back-end, you can now apply to the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program.

The RSP program is for companies that want to offer technical services such as an EPP registry or DNS resolution to new gTLD applicants in the Next Round, currently targeted for April 2026.

Companies that qualify under the program will join an a la carte menu of RSPs published by ICANN that applicants can choose from without worrying that they’ll fail their technical evaluation.

The ASP initiative is for applicants themselves, but only those that come from certain countries seen as under-served (actually a very large list) and are registered non-profits.

ICANN has set aside $10 million for the ASP and expects to offer up to 45 applicants a discount of between 75% and 85% on the base application fee, which is expected to be $227,000.

The window to apply for ASP support is open now and closes November 19 next year. The RSP program is accepting applications until May 20, but the opportunity will reopen during the new gTLD application window the following year.