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.

Comment Tagged: applicant support program, icann. new gtlds, rsp evaluation program

Verisign has much to be thankful for as .com contract renewed

Verisign went into the US Thanksgiving weekend with a freshly renewed .com Registry Agreement that allows it to keep control of its cash cow for another six years with price-raising powers the US government admitted it is powerless to rescind.

The deal with ICANN does not change Verisign’s price caps — it will still be allowed to raise prices by 7% in four of the six-year term — but it does allow ICANN to raise the fees it charges by an amount linked to US inflation.

ICANN has already said it plans to increase its fees on all other gTLD registries, so it seems certain .com, which raises more transaction revenue than any other TLD, will get the same notice before long.

The deal means cost-conscious registrants have a bit of breathing space; Verisign is only allowed to raises prices in the final four years of its term, which runs from yesterday until November 30, 2030.

So, no more price hikes until September 2026. Due to the required notice period, designed to allow registrants to lock in renewal pricing, we’ll almost certainly hear Verisign talk about a fee increase in early 2026.

The US government, via the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, also confirmed that it has renewed its Cooperative Agreement, which is where the price caps come from, with the company:

NTIA recognizes concerns about current pricing and believes a reduction in .com prices would be in the best interest of the public. We also recognize that prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed. That said, both parties must agree to any changes in order for the Cooperative Agreement to be amended. Over the past several months, NTIA and Verisign have engaged in serious conversations, but, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to agree how wholesale .com pricing should change.

So the status quo remains, at least regards pricing.

The ICANN contract also requires Verisign to act on reports of DNS abuse — malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and some spam — for the first time, in line with the standard RA signed by all other gTLDs.

A side deal that sees Verisign pay ICANN a few extra million bucks a year and commit to cooperate on DNS security has also been renewed, with a strong implication that it will too become part of the contractual status quo over the coming year.

Comment Tagged: .com, ICANN, ntia, pricing, verisign

Another 40,000 .ai domains registered

Anguilla’s .ai grew by almost 40,000 domains in the last two months, according to the registry, as the ccTLD continues to benefit from the growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

Total registered domains was 572,575 domains on November 27, according to the registry web site. That’s up 39,507 from the 533,068 it reported on October 1. On December 20, 2023 the total was 353,928 domains.

.ai is in the process of a migration, which will see Identity Digital take over the functions of the registry. The TLD’s IANA record was recently updated to replace as technical contact the long-time manager Vince Cate with the Government of Anguilla.

Unlike other rapidly growing TLDs, which tend to sell cheap and rapidly fill up with junk, .ai still commands a mid-range price of $70 a year with a two-year minimum.

Comment Tagged: ai, identity digital

RDRS usage hits new low

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service was used less often in October than in any other month since it launched a year ago, according to the latest statistics.

There were 131 requests for private Whois data in the month, down from the previous low of 141 recorded in May and September’s 189, the monthly report published by ICANN shows.

There were 98 closed requests — another new low — and the mix of granted/refused requests tilted more towards approval than usual, with almost 35% of requests being approved versus 56% denied.

While it took on average 3.41 days for requests to be approved, the average time for denial was an incredible 41.96 days.

Three new registrars joined the voluntary pilot program in October, giving RDRS coverage of 60% of registered gTLD domain names.

The monthly report breaks down the geographic location of requestors and the requestor type for the first time, showing that the US was by far the biggest, followed by the UK, France and Brazil, with American IP owners and law enforcement most likely to request data.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, privacy, rdrs, whois

A dot-brand that was actually used is shutting down

It’s been a slow year for self-terminating dot-brand gTLDs, but today we’ve seen our third.

Lipsy, a UK-based women’s fashion retail brand owned by Next, has told ICANN it wants to end its Registry Agreement for .lipsy, which it has operated since 2016.

What’s unusual about this termination is that Lipsy actually had quite a lot of registered domains — at least 133 over the years, of which 132 were still active a month ago.

My records show that all of its domains apart from the registry home page were deleted October 22, the day before the company sent its termination notice to ICANN.

The domains were generally product keywords which pretty much all redirected to next.co.uk or nextdirect.com; Lipsy’s own web site had also redirected to Next’s since 2018.

Almost all of its domains were registered between December 2020 and July 2022. It hasn’t registered any since.

.lipsy was on Verisign’s back-end until May 2023, when it switched to Identity Digital.

1 Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN, lipsy, next, termination

.id joins the million-domain club

Indonesia’s .id appears to have become the newest ccTLD to be able to boast that it has passed the one million registered domains mark.

PANDI, the local registry, is reporting on its web site that it currently has 1,073,779 registered domains. According to my database, it passed a million on November 14.

At a time when many TLDs are shrinking, .id is adding new regs at a rate you’d normally associate with a heavily discounted new gTLD. It’s grown by over 100,000 names net in the last year and reports on its web site it’s added almost 400,000 gross over the same period.

.id uses a three-level structure, which over a dozen extensions to choose from, such as .co.id, .net.id and .or.id. While second-level regs are also available, .my.id is the most-popular option, with a little over a third of all registered names.

Indonesia is the fourth-largest nation in the world by population after India, China and the USA. It has about 277 million inhabitants of whom an estimated 69% have internet access.

There are at least 40 TLDs that can currently count their domains under management in seven figures or more.

Comment Tagged: .id, pandi

GoDaddy’s .xxx contract renewed

GoDaddy’s .xxx gTLD will no longer be “sponsored”, following a vote of ICANN’s board of directors last week.

At its ICANN 81 AGM in Istanbul, the board approved the renewal of GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry’s Registry Agreement.

The new deal closely follows the text of the standard RA most other gTLDs use, scrapping restrictions that GoDaddy found onerous but which were vital in getting the deal approved in the first place back in 2011.

It means the end of IFFOR, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the largely toothless oversight body that had been tasked with creating policies and issuing grants to worth causes but arguably did neither.

It also means less friction for the .xxx registration process, as registrants will no longer have to affirm they are members of the “sponsored community”, which never existed in any real sense anyway.

Some elements of the original sponsorship agreement, such as strict prohibitions on child sexual abuse material and the suggestion thereof, have been moved to Public Interest Commitments that ICANN could in theory enforce.

In its resolution text, ICANN noted that the Governmental Advisory Committee, which almost got .xxx killed off a couple decades ago, had not felt strongly enough about the new deal to publicly comment on it one way or the other.

.xxx makes most of its money from defensive registrations. It had almost 45,000 domains under management at the end of June, but barely 7,000 of those appeared in its zone file of the same date. That does not included domains blocked via the AdultBlock and GlobalBlock services, which are not counted in any public document but which I estimate are measured in five figures.

Comment Tagged: godaddy, ICANN, xxx

Twitter clone Bluesky has one feature domain people should like

People are abandoning Twitter, and they seem to be largely gravitating towards a very similar clone that has one feature that should appeal to domain owners.

Bluesky, available at bsky.app, was set up by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey five years ago. It’s adding about a million users a day right now, rapidly approaching the 20 million mark today.

Anecdotally, it seems its surge in popularity has come about due to widespread dissatisfaction with Twitter’s miserable direction under Elon Musk’s leadership, particularly due to his role in the recent US presidential election.

So I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and grab my Bluesky screen name before somebody else could.

But it turns out I didn’t need to. Bluesky has a feature that allows you to use your domain as your username, and it’s verified so nobody else can claim it.

You need to simply add a short TXT record to your DNS settings, which Bluesky can check. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you already know how to do this. It takes about two minutes.

So I’m domainincite.com on the platform and I’ll be posting there alongside Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook from now on. Feel free to join me.

1 Comment Tagged: bluesky, twitter

ICANN confirms two bans on new gTLD gaming

ICANN’s board of directors has just voted to approve two bans on practices in the new gTLD program that could be considered “gaming”.

It’s banned applicants for the same string from privately paying each other to drop out of contention, such as via private auctions, and has banned singular and plural versions of the same string from coexisting.

The plurals ban means that if, for example, one company applies for .podcast and another applies for .podcasts, they will go into the same contention set and only one will ultimately go live.

It also means that you can’t apply for the single/plural equivalent of an already-existing gTLD. So if you were planning to apply for, oh I dunno, .farms for example, you’re out of luck.

The move should mean that lazy applicants won’t be able to rely on piggybacking on the marketing spend of their plural/singular rivals, or on purely defensive registrations. I will also reduce end-user confusion.

The ban on private contention resolution means that contention sets will largely be resolved via an ICANN-run “auction of last resort”, in which ICANN gets all the money.

In the 2012 application round, private resolution was encouraged, and some companies made tens of millions of dollars from their rivals by losing auctions and withdrawing their applications.

Both bans had been encouraged by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and received the unanimous support of the board (excluding conflict-related abstentions) at the Org’s AGM in Turkiye this afternoon.

Comment Tagged: auctions, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, plural, private auctions, singular

eBay slogan domain no longer has a BIN price

Looks like domain investor TopDomains is a DI reader.

The domain people.love, which would be needed if eBay wanted to make its new Things.People.Love slogan a functioning call-to-action, no longer has a buy-it-now option, a few days after I first wrote about it.

It had been listed with a $75,000 BIN price, along with a lease-to-own option. Now, the only option appears to be a brokered deal.

The owner of the domain seems to have also wildcarded the third level, so the domain things.people.love actually resolves to the sales lander. It did not resolve at all on Monday.

Comment Tagged: .love, ebay