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.

Comment Tagged: .ai.kr, .io.kr, .it.kr, .kr, .me.kr, kisa

it.com now bigger than Guatemala

There are now more than 25,000 registered it.com domain names, according to it.com Domains.

The company said earlier this week that it recently crossed that milestone, about two years after it went to general availability.

it.com sells third-level names under the .it.com domain, much like XYZ.com sells .uk.com domains, representing information technology, Italy, or just the pronoun “it”.

The 25,000-name milestone means .it.com now has comparable domains under management to cTLDs such as Guatemala’s .gt, as well as 20-year-old .travel and new gTLD first-mover .ninja.

It would be ranked around 230th by size if it was included on the list of TLDs that DI tracks.

Comment Tagged: it.com

ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program

ICANN says it will use a combination of AI and crowdsourcing to translate new gTLD program materials on the cheap.

Org said in a blog post that when a community member trying to drum up interest in new gTLDs in their local community needs some official ICANN documents in an unsupported language, ICANN will prepare a translation on demand.

The first run will be done with AI machine translation, and the draft will be posted on a community wiki for review by volunteers who can read the relevant language before ICANN finalizes and publishes a final PDF.

ICANN seems ready to post drafts of documents such as FAQs and info sheets in languages such as Hindi, Italian and Portuguese after next week’s ICANN 82 public meeting.

Program documents are usually only available in the six official UN languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian — so this project should bring the new gTLD program to a much wider audience.

Using AI and volunteers should mean it costs almost nothing beyond the work hours ICANN staff put in to administer it.

ChatGPT tells me that there are 195 to 200 official national languages in the world and 3,500 to 4,000 written languages altogether, but I didn’t check whether those numbers are correct.

If the AI is wrong, let me know in the comments.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs

Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board

Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon, has been elected to serve on ICANN’s board of directors, representing registries and registrars.

He beat Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows, in the two-horse second round of voting, and five other candidates overall, to become the Contracted Parties House selection for Seat 13 on the board.

He will replace Becky Burr, an ICANN community lifer formerly with Neustar, who is term-limited and will leave the board after nine years at the Org’s Annual General Meeting in Muscat, Oman, this October.

DiBiase is currently chair of the GNSO Council and identifies as a registrar rather than a registry (Amazon is both).

He said in his candidate statement (pdf) late last year that ICANN today is too “risk-averse”, focussing too much on its fear of lawsuits, and that it should be more accountable when responding to community complaints.

DiBiase told DI:

I look forward to serving the Contracted Parties in this role and am honored by their trust in me. During the course of the election, my fellow candidates articulated a wealth of ideas on how to improve ICANN and multi-stakeholder model. These perspectives will guide me as a member of the ICANN Board.

The election result needs to be given the nod by the GNSO Council and the ICANN Empowered Community, both of which are usually pretty much formalities, before he can formally take on his board role.

1 Comment Tagged: board, elections, gnso, ICANN

Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD

Identity Digital appears to have taken over the back-end registry for Mauritian ccTLD .mu, potentially improving the company’s chances of future-proofing at-risk .io.

IANA records show that .mu has started using Identity Digital’s nameservers and Whois service. Registrars say the migration to ID’s EPP system happened last week.

Mauritius is poised to be given sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago, formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, from the UK, assuming the still-unpublished treaty is approved by both governments.

BIOT is assigned the popular .io ccTLD which may have more than a million registrations and makes Identity Digital, which acquired the UK-based registry operator a few years ago, about $40 million a year.

The change of control of Chagos, which would certainly come with a name change for the territory, puts the future of .io at risk, as I have been reporting for the last several months.

But with Identity Digital now in bed with the .mu ccTLD manager — a private company named Internet Direct that also goes by MU-NIC — it has a foot in the door for improving relations with the country, should .io come under threat in future.

I believe MU-NIC was previously using CoCCA’s software to manage .mu.

(Hat tip: DI reader “Tom”)

2 Comments Tagged: .mu, biot, chagos, identity digital, io, mauritius

Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot

Tucows has dramatically dropped out of ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service pilot.

The company said that RDRS provides a poor user experience that harms user privacy and causes ICANN to produce misleading usage statistics that show an artificially high request denial rate.

RDRS is a bit more than half way through a two-year pilot designed to gather data that will help ICANN decide whether to deploy a more permanent and probably more expensive long-term solution.

The service is essentially a clearinghouse that connects people who want to request private Whois data with the registrars that manage domains of interest.

Tucows said in a blog post:

Given that the RDRS Standing Committee has enough data to complete its report, as well as the customer experience challenges and data privacy concerns we’ve outlined above, Tucows Domains has decided to end our participation in the RDRS.

The move makes Tucows the highest-profile registrar to pull out of the service to date. Across its various brands (such as Ascio, Enom, EPAG, and OpenSRS) it has around 10 million domains under management.

As of the end of January, RDRS had 94 registrars on board, covering 60% of all registered gTLD domains.

Tucows said it will continue to offer its TACO service, which also allows entities such as intellectual property interests to request private Whois data but charges requesters at least $3,000 a year, which it calls a “cost recovery fee”.

The TACO fee can be waived for “single-use and non-commercial requestors”, Tucows noted. It has updated its terms accordingly.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, privacy, rdrs, tucows, whois

Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba is throwing its weight behind its dot-brand gTLD, .toshiba.

The company announced today that from next month it will start to migrate all of its employees to @mail.toshiba email addresses, starting with group parent Toshiba Corp, which currently uses @toshiba.co.jp.

For an unspecified period, mail sent to the current .jp addresses will auto-forward to .toshiba, but this backwards compatibility will be turned off eventually, the company said.

Toshiba said the switch will “prevent unauthorized use of email addresses by phishing emails impersonating people in Toshiba Group and reduce security risks”. This is often pitched as a key benefit of dot-brands.

The company has been using global.toshiba as its primary web site domain for a few years already. It maintains other localized domains in ccTLDs and .com as well.

Apart from global.toshiba and mail.toshiba, .toshiba has no other functioning dot-brand domains.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, toshiba

Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning

A Norwegian private equity company has dropped its plans to acquire Team Internet after Google changed the way it handles advertising on parked domains, a key source of revenue for the company.

Oslo-based Verdane had a deadline of today to announce a formal offer for the company, but instead said it “does not intend to make an offer” because “there has been a material change of circumstances”.

While Verdane did not elaborate, there was a simultaneous announcement from Team Internet that Google’s recently announced changes to AdSense for Domains present a “challenge” that will harm its business faster than it can adapt.

Google said last week that as of March 19 it will start opting its advertisers out of AFD, the service domainers and registrars use to monetize many parked domain names. Advertisers will be able to opt back in, but are not expected to do so en masse.

Team Internet’s Search reporting unit made $72 million of its $91 million net revenue from AFD last year, which it expects to decline following the changes.

The company said it plans to instead monetize its domains using Google’s newer Related Search On Content product, which shows Google search results including paid results on the publishers’ own sites, based on the content of the page.

That presumably means Team Internet is going to have to populate its domains with spammy, low-quality and presumably AI-generated content, in order to trigger the RSOC contextual algorithm. Thanks, Google!

“The market development has been long-anticipated, though the announced acceleration is a challenge,” Team Internet told investors.

“It is anticipated that, during this transition period, contributions from AFD will decline faster than contributions from RSOC appreciate, meaning that the financial performance of Team Internet’s Search segment will see a trough in 2025 before it recovers from 2026 onwards and returns to the long-term pattern,” it added.

It expects adjusted EBITDA to more than halve for the year in its Search segment, from $57 million last year to between $20 million and $25 million this year. The company said its domains business, which includes its registry and registrars, should be unaffected.

But that domains business seems to be still up for sale. Team Internet said it has received “repeated approaches” for the domains unit and is carrying out a “comprehensive review of its asset ownership”.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, adsense, google, parking, team internet, verdane

.ai channel doubles under new management

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company.

The company said over the weekend that its channel has doubled since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based on an archived list published by the old registry.

That’s a tiny chunk of the hundreds of registrars that already plug in to Identity Digital’s other TLDs — .org has about 2,150 registrars and .live has over 1,600, for examples — meaning there’s a lot more room for growth.

Identity Digital also said that .ai saw a 46% year-over-year increase in the number of new domain creates in January. A graph it published shows creates around 23,000 to 24,000 in the month.

We can’t work out what .ai’s domains under management is, because we don’t know what the renewal rate was or how many domains were deleted, but the previous administrator had said there was just shy of 600,000 names at the end of 2024.

It’s also emerged that Identity Digital might have inked a pretty sweet deal with Anguilla. According to a recent video from former manager Vince Cate, the company is taking 10% of the revenues from .ai’s sales

While that might not be a huge slice of the pie, it’s a pretty big pie — bog standard .ai names sell for $70 a year and auctioned expired names regularly sell for thousands.

A $7 per-domain payment is very high for a back-end registry services deal, where providers are believed to usually get a buck or two, but it seems Identity Digital might be providing more than just a dumb platform to .ai.

1 Comment Tagged: ai, identity digital

Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io

US president Donald Trump has indicated he is likely to back a UK-Mauritius treaty that puts the long-term future of .io domains into question.

Speaking to the media yesterday before a meeting with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he was “inclined” to support the deal, which would see sovereignty of the Chagos Islands transferred to Mauritius.

Chagos, officially the British Indian Ocean Territory, has the popular .io ccTLD, which is managed by a UK shell company belonging to Identity Digital.

The change of control would likely lead to a change of name, which could eventually lead to .io being retired, as I have previously written.

Trump’s opinion on the deal was seen as critical, as Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia, is currently home to a strategically important UK-US military base. The proposed treaty would see the UK lease Diego Garcia from Mauritius for at least 99 years.

UK ministers have recently indicated that the US had an effective veto on the treaty, but Trump said yesterday: “They’re talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, about 140 years actually. That’s a long time, and I think we’ll be inclined to go along with your country.”

While it’s not a definite yes, it perhaps shows the direction of travel, and it’s not great news for .io registrants. Any retirement of .io would take five to 10 years from the point the process starts, so there’s no need to panic just yet.

3 Comments Tagged: biot, chagos, identity digital, io