As customers flee legacy gTLDs, .org tops 11 million names

Almost every legacy gTLD is shrinking, but .org is thriving and recently hit a major milestone.

Public Interest Registry announced yesterday that it’s passed the 11 million registered names milestone, with CEO Jon Nevett calling it “a big moment for our organization”.

Looking at zone file records, it appears that the 11 million mark was passed some time last month. It’s added about 240,000 domains to its zone since the start of 2024.

The same records show that almost all legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs are shrinking, some by alarming numbers.

It will not be news to regular readers that .com and .net volumes have been suffering recently, with .com down about 3.4 million names since the start of the year and .net down about 477,000.

In percentage terms, .pro is by far the biggest loser over the same period. It started the year with 718,000 names in its zone and has just 484,000 today, losing about a third of its domains.

The larger legacies — .info, .biz, .asia and .mobi — have all gone down by tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the smaller gTLDs .name, .tel, .coop, .museum and .aero all suffered losses commensurate with their size.

It’s not really fair to judge .xxx by the size of its zone, as GoDaddy Registry mainly sells .xxx as defensive registrations that never see the zone, but it’s also down this year.

The only other legacy gTLDs that have grown this year are .jobs, .cat and .travel, which have all experienced modest growth measured in the hundreds of domains.

The lack of a profit motive is likely behind PIR’s success.

Despite having price caps removed from its ICANN contract and experiencing the same inflationary pressures as the rest of us, it has declined to increase its renewal fees, unlike the other legacy gTLDs with large customer bases.

Americans are deserting .com

Forget China, Verisign is now seeing most of its domain sales weakness coming from the US.

The company revealed in its quarterly earnings call last week that .com and .net were down by a combined 1.1 million names in the third quarter, and 850,000 of those losses were from American registrars.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the weakness was a result of US registrars concentrating more on making existing customers more profitable and less on acquiring new customers.

Registrars are raising prices and pushing more secondary market sales, he said. That’s great for the registrars’ bottom lines, but it doesn’t help Verisign shift product.

There were 169.6 million .com and .net domains at the end of Q3, Bidzos said. The Q3 renewal rate is expected to be about 72.3%, compared to 73.5% a year ago.

There was also weakness in China, he said, due to economic factors and regulation. China has frequently been blamed for sales fluctuations in previous weak quarters. Europe was actually up by 200,000 names, Bidzos said.

Verisign now expects domain growth of between -2.9% and -2.3% for the full year, narrowing its forecast from the -3% to -2% it predicted in July and the +1% to -1% predicted at the start of the year.

Higher wholesale prices means the company is still growing, however. Revenue was up 3.8% to $391 million and net income was up from $188 million to $201 million compared to year-ago numbers.

Weak Q3 for the domain universe, Verisign reports

The number of domain names registered worldwide decreased slightly in the third quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The total of 362.3 million domains was down 0.1 million on the quarter. It would have been up had it not been for a 1.1 million decline in the combined .com and .net gTLDs, a pattern we’ve seen for the last several quarters.

.com was down to 156.7 million names from 157.6 million, while .net slipped below 13 million to 12.9 million, Verisign said.

Pre-2012 gTLD domains not including .com and .net were up 100,000 to 17.3 million and ccTLD registrations were up by the same amount to 140.1 million at the end of the quarter, the DNIB says.

New gTLD registrations were up 800,000 to 35.4 million, Verisign said.

bit.ليبيا? Libya to get its Arabic ccTLD

Libyan ccTLD .ly is to get an Arabic version, ICANN has said.

The TLD is ليبيا. (Arabic reads left to right, so the dot goes at the end), means “Libya”, and the ASCII Punycode that will actually show up in the DNS is .xn--mgbb7fyab.

ICANN said that the string has passed the String Evaluation phase of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track process and is now eligible for delegation.

It’s not entirely clear how long Libya was in the “Fast Track” process, but Wikipedia has records of requests for ليبيا. going back over a decade. That’s not unusual.

But ليبيا. is an unusual, though not unprecedented, case of an IDN ccTLD set to be delegated to a different manager than the existing Latin-script ccTLD’s registry.

The Arabic version is set to go to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics, Regulatory Affairs Directorate, while .ly is delegated to the General Post and Telecommunication Company.

.ly is of course well known on the Anglophone internet as a domain hack, with the best-known registrant probably URL shortening service bit.ly.

Namecheap scores win in .org price-cap lawsuit

Namecheap’s lawsuit over ICANN’s decision to lift price caps in .org and .info will be allowed to proceed, a California judge has ruled.

The Superior Court in Los Angeles recently threw out ICANN’s attempt to get the case dismissed, according to court documents released by ICANN. There will now be a hearing in January.

Namecheap’s lawsuit concerns ICANN’s decision in 2019 to lift price caps in Public Interest Registry’s .org contract and the .info contract then with Afilias (now Identity Digital).

Both registries had previously been limited to a 10% price increase every year.

The registrar filed an Independent Review Process case against ICANN, which is mostly won. In 2022, the IRP panel slammed ICANN for its secrecy and lack of adherence to its bylaws and issued seven recommended actions the Org could take to rectify its transgressions.

In the current lawsuit, filed this January, Namecheap claims that ICANN “largely ignored” most of these recommendations. It wants the court to force the Org to abide by the IRP ruling, which among other things calls for ICANN to look into reinstituting price caps.

But ICANN objected, saying Namecheap “is asking this Court to convert recommendations into requirements”, adding that it “does not have an obligation to act in accordance with the ‘recommendations’ of an IRP Panel”.

It demurred, asking the court to throw out Namecheap’s complaint, but the court declined to do so on legal grounds, meaning the claims will be heard on the merits.

In the five years since the .org and .info price caps were lifted, non-profit PIR has not raised .org prices once.

For-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices every year, by between 9.38% and 11.03%, raising the cost from $10.84 in 2019 to $17.50 today. The price will go up again by 8.57% to $19.00 in January.

Nominet names directors after tight election

Ashley La Bolle and Rex Wickham have been named Nominet non-executive directors after an election that saw the top three candidates finish with very close numbers.

Nominet said La Bolle, who works for Tucows, and Wickham, who works for 2020Media, were elected after three rounds of votes and took their seats immediately at the company’s AGM yesterday.

La Bolle was an incumbent, having been originally elected three years ago amid one of the most fractious periods in Nominet’s history.

Wickham replaces Simon Blackler, who won his seat in 2021 as lead of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which managed to oust key members of management and board and force Nominet to refocus its business the same year. He did not stand for reelection.

Voting results shared by the company show that Rob Golding of Astutium came a close third in the race, receiving a third-round total of 272,213 votes, compared to Wickham’s 287,794 and La Bolle’s 297,258.

Turnout was 10.6%, the lowest level in the last few years, perhaps indicating a lack of displeasure with Nominet’s current direction.

Identity Digital to take over .ai

Identity Digital is to take over the running of .ai, following a deal with the Government of Anguilla announced today.

The two parties said they “plan to build a world-class registry management program that prioritizes quality domains and instills trust in .AI domain names for years to come”.

It looks like a back-end deal. There’s no suggestion of any kind of redelegation.

Currently, .ai is run by a small local outfit called DataHaven.Net, on a fairly basic web site that gives off all the vibes of being a one-man show and perhaps a little bit slapdash.

Identity Digital, by contrast, runs its huge portfolio of TLDs on the Amazon cloud and has pretty much blanket coverage of ICANN-accredited registrars. Only 40 registrars are listed on the current .ai registry site.

The ccTLD has grown to be a significant player in the last two years, growing from about 150,000 domains mid-2022, prior to generative AI entering the popular imagination, to 533,068 at the start of this month.

Identity Digital said that .ai already accounts for 20% of Anguilla’s revenue, and that this new deal should help increase that amount.

Unstoppable tops four million names

Unstoppable Domains says it has now registered over four million names on its collection of blockchain-based alternative naming systems.

The volume appears to spread across multiple extensions. Unstoppable runs names such as .crypto, .x, .wallet and .nft, as well as dozens of more obscure branded strings, such as .pudgy and .bald, with its partners.

If we were to treat the whole Unstoppable portfolio as a single TLD, it would be about as large as India’s .in or France’s .fr, and hundreds of thousands of names larger than XYZ.com’s .xyz.

It would be more than twice as big as RealNames was at its peak, and many times larger than AOL Keywords. Just saying.

Amazon readying fashion and book gTLDs

Amazon appears to be dusting off two of its long-dormant gTLDs, targeting the books and fashion industries ahead of launch next year.

But it’s probably not worth getting too excited about if you only speak English. The TLDs are .ファッション (.xn--bck1b9a5dre4c), which is Japanese for “fashion” and .書籍 (.xn--rovu88b), which is Chinese for “books”.

Updated dates filed with ICANN show Amazon Registry is planning to take both to general availability in early November 2025. That’s not a typo, the dates really are over a year away.

No pricing or registration policy information is available.

The two TLD have both already carried out their mandatory sunrise periods — eight years ago — and currently have 50-odd names in their zone files, which all appear to be internal or sunrise registrations.

Amazon has 54 gTLDs, a mixture of dot-brands and generic terms, according to my database, but only nine generics have launched and only two have registrations measured in the thousands.

The company applied for its dictionary-word, product-category TLDs at a time when it thought it would be able to keep them a closed shop where it could keep all the domains to itself.

Five times ICANN deleted a ccTLD, and what it means for .io

With the future of .io coming into question this week, with the news that the UK will return sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, I thought it would be a good time to see how ICANN has treated disappearing countries and territories in the past.

As far as I can tell, ccTLDs have been removed from the DNS root on only five occasions since ICANN came into existence in 1998.

While the circumstances differ, in all but one case the trigger for the deletion was a change to the International Standards Organization’s ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which ICANN uses to decide who gets a ccTLD and what ccTLD they get.

.yu — Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in 1992 due to a bloody civil war, but it wasn’t until 2010 that ICANN finally removed .yu from the root.

Splinter nations Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were all assigned their own new country codes — .si, .hr, .mk and .ba — in the 1990s, but the now independent and separate states of Serbia and Montenegro, initially known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, carried on using .yu.

When the country renamed itself the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, the ISO list was updated to assign it the new code .cs, but the corresponding ccTLD was never actually delegated before the country broke up again in 2006, getting the ccTLDs .rs and .me the following year.

RNIDS, the .rs registry, carried on running .yu for a few years while it transitioned registrants to the new ccTLD. The process was not entirely painless, and ICANN had to keep .yu live longer than planned, before eventually deleting it April 1, 2010.

.tp — Portuguese Timor

The country we now know as East Timor or Timor Leste started the 21st century as Portuguese Timor, under Indonesian occupation. Its ccTLD was .tp.

After the country gained its independence in 2002, it renamed itself Timor Leste and the ISO assigned it the new code TL, deleting TP from its list.

IANA delegated .tl to the local government in 2005 and encouraged .tp registrants to migrate, but it took a full decade before it followed through and removed .tp from the root, in February 2015.

.zr — Zaire

The first ccTLD to get deleted by IANA under ICANN’s watch was .zr, which was no longer needed after Zaire changed its name to Democratic Republic of the Congo, receiving the code CD from ISO, in 1997.

The pre-ICANN IANA delegated .cd to the newly named country in 1997 and the registry operator set about moving .zr names to .cd. By 2001, that process was completed and .zr was deleted from the root.

.an — Netherlands Antilles

The Netherlands Antilles was a collection of former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, until the territory split, with its component islands receiving new statuses under Dutch law, in 2010. The ccTLD was .an.

Curaçao got .cw, Sint Maarten (Dutch part) got the sexy-sounding .sx, and Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba got to share .bq. ISO removed AN from its list.

The transition was a bit more complicated than usual, as .an registrants had to transfer to a new ccTLD based on what island they were on, but the local authorities managed it and within five years .an went poof.

.um — United States Minor Outlying Islands

This one’s unique in that it was deleted apparently simply because the registry operator couldn’t be bothered with it any more.

The United States Minor Outlying Islands are pretty much unpopulated, but strategically well-located, islands belonging to the US. There’s eight in the Pacific and one in the Caribbean.

Its ccTLD was operated by the University of Southern California until 2006, when somebody at ICANN noticed it appeared to be broken. When it approached USC for an explanation, it was told “they were no longer interested in managing the .UM domain”.

It had no registered domains, so there was no need for a transition plan and IANA deleted it from the root the following year.

The islands and their code are still on the ISO list and are still eligible for their ccTLD. Presumably it’s only the fact that the US government has asserted its authority over .um that has prevented an opportunist Just Some Guy registry from snapping it up to market .um domains as the leading destination for indecisive people or something.

What does this mean for .io?

ICANN’s policy on ccTLDs is pretty straightforward — your territory has to be on the ISO 3166 list and the ccTLD has to match the code ISO gives you. If your code drops off the list, you have five years, extensible to 10, to conduct an orderly transition before the TLD is retired.

Much like Portuguese Timor changing its name to Timor Leste to shuck off its enforced colonial branding, it seems inconceivable that the Chagos Archipelago will continue to be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The key questions for .io registrants are: will the renamed BIOT keep the IO assignment on the ISO list, and will the archipelago continue to qualify as a distinct territory eligible for ccTLD status?

If BIOT simply becomes part of Mauritius, no longer recognized by the UN as a distinct territory, .io gains an existential threat. It would drop off ISO’s list and ICANN could issue it a retirement notice.

If BIOT remains a distinct territory and remains eligible for a ccTLD, the possibilities become a whole lot more interesting.

If Mauritius decides to change the territory’s name, there’s no problem. But if it asks ISO for a corresponding change of two-letter code to better reflect its new name, .io’s future is in doubt.

If the name is changed to something like “Chagos” and Mauritius wants a “C” code, only CB, CE and CJ are still available.

Theoretically, the government of Mauritius could unilaterally force an undesirable string change on Identity Digital, the American company that runs the .io registry, forcing a years-long migration to the newly chosen ccTLD.

I can’t imagine many of .io’s hundreds of thousands of registrants, particularly those using .io as a domain hack or to hitch themselves to a cool tech-startup bandwagon, being happy with a forced migration to, say, .cj.

The power to decoolify an entire TLD would be a compelling weapon in a redelegation fight. I’m deep into speculative territory here, but I can’t help but feel that Identity Digital is going to have to give Mauritius some money at some point.

Another possibility is that the registry, one of ICANN’s biggest funders, could lobby ICANN to change its policies and somehow grandfather .io in as a stateless ccTLD.

The fact that ICANN hasn’t acted to remove .su from the root, thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, could be seen as precedent.

The answers to .io’s future might be found in the proposed UK-Mauritius treaty, but that has yet to be published. As it has to be ratified by the UK Parliament we can expect it to enter the public domain before long.