Introducing Stringtel, my new free new gTLD tool

I’ve launched Stringtel, a free, industry-first string discovery and risk mitigation tool for new gTLD applicants.

Stringtel is designed to help applicants reduce the risk of their chosen gTLD strings being banned or incurring extra costs during the application process, as well as helping them discover potentially valuable undelegated strings.

The TL;DR

Stringtel gives you data that will help you pick a good string to apply for, and tells you some of the risks that string might present during the application process.

The goal is to help applicants avoid wasting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on crappy applications.

Risk mitigation

Stringtel implements the string-related rules in the latest version of ICANN’s New gTLD Applicant Guidebook, along with other risk factors, leveraging a database of almost a million possibly problematic strings, to offer applicants a quick look into issues that could kill or complicate their applications.

Enter a string and Stringtel will tell you if it would be blocked outright under AGB rules, or could trigger additional analysis, objections, fees, or contention with other applicants.

Stringtel does dozens of risk checks, along with countless associated string similarity checks, to give you a shortlist of the most likely reasons your application might fail.

Opportunity identification

New gTLDs might have a better chance of succeeding when they reflect how domains are already being used.

Stringtel analyzes over 180 million domains across .com, .net and .org, counting how often specific strings appear immediately to the left of the dot.

If a string is already widely used as a domain ending, that’s a signal of existing demand. For example, if tens of thousands of domains already end in “bakery”, that suggests a .bakery gTLD could have a ready-made market.

Essentially, Stringtel shows you where registrants are already behaving as if the dot were somewhere else — and where a new gTLD could turn that behavior into shorter domains.

It also helps filter out strings that look appealing but have little real-world usage, reducing the risk of applying for a gTLD nobody actually wants.

And because everyone keeps asking…

No, Stringtel does not record your searches. The data would be useless. I have no visibility whatsoever into what you’re searching for. Neither does anybody else.

Thanks to the sponsors

Many thanks go to Stringtel’s two launch sponsors: Hello Registry and John Matson Consulting.

Hello Registry, a venture of leading ccTLD registries CIRA (.ca) and SIDN (.nl) hosted a webinar on March 31 explaining how to apply for and operate a new gTLD.

Matson has launched TLD.fit, a financial modelling tool that helps new gTLD applicants build their business cases before they pull the trigger on an application.

GlobalBlock signs the two best deals it will ever get

Trademark-blocking service GlobalBlock has added the world’s second and third-largest TLDs to its roster.

China’s .cn and Germany’s .de are now among the hundreds of TLDs, pseudo-TLDs and blockchain namespaces that are covered by the service, which is run by the GoDaddy-managed Brand Safety Alliance.

.cn usually has north of 20 million domains in its zone and .de is currently at around 17.8 million, making them second only to .com in terms of pure domain volume.

These deals are probably the best GlobalBlock will ever get — I can’t see a compelling business case for Verisign to voluntarily sign up .com to the system any time soon.

The next obvious targets would be .uk, .ru, and .nl, the next-largest in the ccTLD space. Several of the larger portfolio gTLD registries such as Radix and XYZ have also yet to join the program.

Nevertheless, GlobalBlock said that it’s recently added 70 “extensions” to the platform, bringing its total to 780.

The outfit says it has blocked five million domains from being registered and recovered over 10,000 domains via Priority AutoCatch, which prevents brand-match names dropping after they expire.

Typosquatter gets two years in jail

A man who used a typosquatted domain to defraud a man out of $146,000 has been given a two-year jail sentence in Australia.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, Indian national Pardeep Pardeep, who was in the country on a student visa and worked as an Uber driver, registered a typo of a local law firm, which the paper did not name.

He then used the domain to email a man who was attempting to buy a house, ultimately tricking him into paying him AUD 209,000, which he then used to buy gold bullion. The victim has been unable to recover his money, the SMH reported.

Pardeep, having spent nine months on remand, will be eligible for parole in June, the paper reported.

NamesCon returning to Miami in November

NameCon Global will be held again in Miami, Florida, for its 2026 conference, organizers said over the weekend.

The annual two-day conference will return November 11 with the Ice Palace Studios as its venue again.

Organizers said they hope to “expand on the networking aspects of the event with a larger Expo Hall and designated networking spaces”.

Tickets are not yet available and pricing has not been announced.

Com Laude buys Fairwinds

Two dot-brand gTLD consultants are to merge in a deal announced today.

London-based Com Laude said it is acquiring Washington DC-based Fairwinds Partners for an undisclosed amount.

Com Laude said that it got more than 120 dot-brand gTLDs for its clients in the 2012 round, and that Fairwinds was the consultant on 133 applications back then.

The company added that it is “currently engaged to assist customers to obtain hundreds of TLDs in the 2026 round”.

Word on the street is that Com Laude is doing gangbusters recruiting dot-brand clients for the Next Round, and scooping up Fairwinds certainly won’t hurt in that effort.

Both companies help brands with their gTLD applications and then take care of the ICANN paperwork to keep them — alive but often dormant — for their lifecycle.

My records show Fairwinds has lost a few dozen gTLD-management customers over the last few years, and has acquired none.

The Next Round is due to open for three months of applications next April.

RDRS may not be dead

ICANN’s pilot Registration Data Request Service could live on beyond its original shelf life, if new recommendations are approved.

The GNSO’s RDRS Standing Committee has reached consensus on six proposals concerning the service’s future, the first of which is that it should carry on operating beyond its original November 2025 cut-off date.

RDRS is the system ICANN put in place to connect people who want access to unredacted Whois records with the registrars holding that data. It hasn’t been a spectacular success, and some large registrars have recently opted out of participation.

But the volunteer Standing Committee, which has been meeting every two weeks to monitor RDRS since it launched in November 2023, says that the service is useful and recommends that the pilot should carry on. Its report states:

The SC recommends maintaining the RDRS pilot service and continuing to promote voluntary registrar participation beyond its initial two-year term until a long-term permanent solution or a successor system is agreed upon.

The draft also recommends upgrading the service to improve the user interface, enable API access for both requestors and registrars, and enabling authentication for users starting with law enforcement.

ccTLD registries should also be allowed to opt in, the report says. Currently, the voluntary service is limited to ICANN-accredited gTLD registrars. At the last count, 78 registrars were participating, covering 47% of all registered gTLD domains.

Five of the committee’s recommendations reached “Full Consensus”, the highest degree of agreement, while one recommendation, discussing future policy work, had some objections and only received “Consensus”.

The report will now be put to the GNSO Council before going to the ICANN board of directors for possible final approval.

Apart from the ongoing running costs, some of the recommendations would require software development work, which costs money.

At the last count, there were 11,360 registered RDRS users and since launch they had submitted 3,344 data requests. That works out to a mean average of 167 per month.

Huge registrars flee from RDRS

Ten notable domain registrars have abandoned ICANN’s pilot Registration Data Request Service, substantially reducing its usefulness.

In June, 10 accredited registrars pulled their support for the voluntary service, which is designed to give law enforcement, IP owners, and security researchers an easier way to request unredacted Whois records.

Team Internet is out, taking with it its registrars 1API, Internet BS, Key-Systems GmbH, Key-Systems LLC, Moniker, RegistryGate and TLD Registrar Solutions.

Newfold Digital exited with Network Solutions, Register․com, and PublicDomainRegistry․com.

The sum of all this is that there are now 78 participating registrars, compared to 88 at the end of May, and they now only represent 47% of all registered gTLD domains, down from 54%.

That’s the lowest level of participation since RDRS launched in late November 2023 and the first time it’s dropped below half of all registered gTLD domains.

Usage of RDRS has dropped to a whole new low. There were only 68 requests for Whois records in June, down from the previous low of 91 in March.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the number of searches that resulted in “Registrar Not Supported” errors remained static at 16%, tying for the lowest ratio across the entire pilot to date.

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee recently said it wants ICANN to consider making RDRS mandatory for all registrars.

Aug 7 Correction: this article originally erroneously stated that Corporation Service Company had removed one registrar and added another. In fact, the registrar in question had simply changed its name. I apologise for the error.

Private Whois requests hit new low after Tucows quits RDRS

March saw the lowest number of requests for private Whois data via ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service since the system launched in late 2023.

ICANN’s latest stats show that there were just 91 requests last month, compared to February’s 143 and the previous low, from last November, of 103.

The dip can probably attributed at least in part to the departure of eight companies from the pool of participating registrars.

Notably, Tucows pulled its four accreditations from the service. Four shell registrars belonging to Tracer (Focus IP) also withdrew because their accreditations have been terminated.

Of the 1,307 domain lookups via RDRS in March, also a new low, 19% were for domains at non-participating registrars. That was up slightly from 17% in February and compares to 25% from the service’s launch.

The average time for a request to be approved was 3.3 days, the second-lowest of any monthly reporting period to date. Denials took on average just over a week. Both metrics were well below the lifetime average.

Intellectual property owners and law enforcement are still the largest categories of requestor, together accounting for almost half of requests in March.

Interestingly, UK cops have now submitted more requests for private data than police from any other country, including the US. Law enforcement requests since last October now stand at 30 for the UK and 29 for the US.

$3,000 to do a Whois lookup?

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service cost hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars every time it was used in its first year, according to an analysis of official stats.

RDRS is the system designed to connect entities such as trademark owners, security researchers, and law enforcement with registrars, allowing them to request private domain registration data that is usually redacted in Whois records.

It’s running as a two-year pilot, in order to gauge demand and effectiveness, and its first full month of operation was December 2023.

ICANN has been publishing monthly transparency reports, including data such as number of requests and outcomes, and we know how much it cost the Org to develop and operate, so it should be possible to make some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much each request costs the ICANN taxpayer.

The cost could range from about $300 to over $3,000 per request, even using some fairly generous assumptions.

RDRS cost $1,647,000 to develop, which is pretty much a shoestring by ICANN standards. Most of that was internal staffing costs, with some also being spent on external security testing services.

The total operational cost for the first 10 months was $685,000. Before ICANN publishes its calendar Q4 financials later this month, we could extrapolate that the first 12 months of operation was around $800,000, but let’s be generous and stick with $685,000 for this particular envelope’s backside.

While there were 7,871 registered requesters at the end of November 2024, they had collectively only submitted 2,260 requests over the same period.

Only 2,057 of those requests had been closed at the end of the period, and only 23% of closed requests resulted in registrar approval and data being fully handed over to the requester.

That works out to 474 approved requests in the first year.

With the most-generous assumptions, $685,000 of ops costs divided by 2,260 requests equals $303 per request.

If we only count approved requests, we’re talking about $1,445 per successful Whois lookup equivalent.

But we should probably switch to an envelope with a larger rear end and include the $1.6 million development costs in our calculations too.

If we factor in half of those costs (it’s a two-year pilot), we’re looking at about $666 per request or $3,181 per successful request in the first 12 months.

If the system was more widely used, the per-request cost would of course fall under this calculation, but there’s no indication that usage is significantly on the increase just yet.

These are only the costs incurred to ICANN. Registrars on one side of the service and requesters on the other also bear their own costs of working with the service.

Dealing with RDRS is not the same as doing a Whois lookup. You have to deal with a much lengthier form, add attachments, make a reasoned legal case for your request, etc. It eats work-hours and staff need to be trained on the system.

It may seem that $3,181 to do a Whois lookup is too expensive for the ICANN taxpayer.

And maybe it is, if it’s being predominantly used to assist (say) Facebook’s trademark enforcement strategy.

But if those Whois lookups help law enforcement more quickly nail a gang of fentanyl dealers or child sexual abuse material distributors, maybe the costs are more than justified.

At the end of November the number of requests from law enforcement was 15.6% of the total, while IP holders accounted for 29.7%, ICANN stats show.

ICANN’s board of directors will decide towards the end of the year whether the RDRS pilot has been successful and whether it should continue indefinitely.

RDRS usage stabilizing?

Usage of ICANN’s experimental Registration Data Request Service may have hit what might in future pass for normal levels, with not a massive amount of fluctuation across several key statistics for the last few months.

But ICANN’s latest monthly stats report, published late last week, shows that July was the worst month so far in terms of closed Whois data disclosure requests, dipping into double digits for the first time since its launch in late 2023.

There were 164 disclosure request in July, down from 169 in June but up on May’s low point of 154. The mix of requester types tilted towards IP owners — 40% versus a lifetime average of 33% — while law enforcement was down.

Only 97 requests were closed during the period, a third consecutive all-time low down from 134 in June and 140 in May. Approved requests were at 22.72% while denied requests were at 65.79%, a slight improvement in terms of the approved/denied mix compared to June.

It took a bit longer to get a request approved in July — 9.3 days on average versus 6.59 in June and a lifetime average of 7.19 days. The median time-to-approval since launch is still two days.

Getting a request denied took about half as long in the period — 10.7 days versus 19.46 in June. The median value is also still two days.

Two new, smaller registrars — one Chinese, one Moroccan — joined the project, and none quit, leading to a total of 92. Registrar coverage remained at 59% of registered gTLD domains.

The number of RDRS queries for domains held at unsupported registrars was down at 27.86% compared to a lifetime average of 29.7% but up against June’s 23.31%.