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

Will Donald Trump be .io’s white knight?

US President-Elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration is reportedly looking into torpedoing a deal between the UK and Mauritius that raises serious questions about the future of the .io ccTLD.

According to The Independent, Trump wants to veto the deal that would see the UK cede sovereignty over most of the Chagos islands, currently known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, and is seeking legal advice from the Pentagon.

The largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, is home to a secretive US-UK military base used to support US actions in the Middle East. Native Chagossians were forcibly removed from the territory to allow its construction in the early 1970s.

The proposed UK-Mauritius treaty would allow the base to continue to exist for at least 99 years, but critics of the deal reportedly worry that Mauritius taking over the rest of BIOT would encourage Chinese espionage.

Since the treaty was announced, questions have been raised about the .io ccTLD, which is assigned to BIOT and commercialized globally by Identity Digital via a UK shell company.

ICANN confirmed in writing today that if the International Standards Organization removes IO from its list of territories, “a five-year time window will commence during which time usage of the domain will need to be phased out”.

But there are other considerations that have received fewer column inches. Head of the IANA function, which looks after the root zone, Kim Davies added:

Country-code top-level domains are operated for the benefit of the country or territory they represent. Managers of these domains must maintain an operational nexus with that country to ensure they have appropriate local accountability mechanisms for how the domain name is operated. Should this jurisdictional change take effect, changes may be required to ensure proper accountability to the new country.

In other words, there’s a scenario in which .io disappears and a scenario in which Identity Digital and Mauritius have to come to some kind of arrangement. Both would cost the registry money, but the latter seems like it would be less costly for registrants.

But if a new Trump administration decides to ignore international law and somehow persuades the UK to withdraw from the deal, the status quo for .io could persist.

The UK-Mauritius treaty has not yet been ratified. It’s expected to be debated by the UK parliament, where the new Labour government certainly has the votes to get it passed, early next year.

1 Comment Tagged: chagos. identity digital, io, trump

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.

Comment Tagged: .org, pir

Company accidentally puts porn domain on kids’ toys

Toy-maker Mattel has had to apologize after accidentally printing the domain name of a porn site on the packaging of dolls designed for little girls.

The company mistakenly plugged the domain name wicked.com on boxes containing dolls of characters from the movie Wicked, which is based on the musical of the same name and set in the same world as The Wizard of Oz.

This domain leads to a (actually pretty tame) porn site, where you have to click through an age verification page before you see anything even vaguely suggestive. The movie’s actual web site is at wickedmovie.com.

“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this,” Mattel reportedly said in a statement. It advised parents to throw out the box and not visit the web site.

The toys themselves have reportedly been yanked from retailers. There seems to be little doubt that not paying attention to its domain is going to cost Mattel money as Christmas and the film’s release date approach.

The domain wicked.movie has been registered since January to a third party who has listed it for sale at $4,000.

Comment

eBay’s new slogan looks like a $75,000 domain it doesn’t own

eBay has launched a television and radio advertising campaign featuring a slogan that looks very much like a domain name that the company does not actually own.

The campaign, reportedly eBay’s first global branding campaign in a decade, targets Gen Z customers looking for vintage and second-hand clothing and other goods.

The new slogan is “Things.People.Love”.

While the dots are not vocalized, it sure looks like a domain name.

The domain things.people.love does not currently resolve, but .love is a real TLD and people.love is registered to a domain investor.

It belongs to TopDomains, a portfolio of premium domain names mostly for sale with buy-it-now or lease-to-own prices.

The domain people.love has a BIN of $75,000, peanuts for a company with a market cap of $30 billion.

1 Comment Tagged: .love, ebay

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.

2 Comments Tagged: .com, .net, earnings, financials, verisign

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.

1 Comment Tagged: dnib, verisign

ICANN says it WILL raise its domain taxes soon

Prices in all gTLDs will go up after ICANN told registries and registrars last week that it plans to increase the fees it charges them, sometimes called its “tax”, next year.

The extra fee ICANN takes from registrars for each new domain registration and renewal will increase from $0.18 to $0.20, according to an email sent from ICANN VP Russ Weinstein to registrars Thursday evening.

This fee is typically passed on explicitly and directly to registrants in their registrar’s shopping cart.

Less-visible charges on registries will also go up. The fixed quarterly fee will go from $6,250 per quarter ($25,000 per year) to $6,450 per quarter ($25,800 per year) and the per-transaction fee will go up from $0.25 per year to $0.258 per year.

The registry fee changes will take effect January 1, but the registrar fee changes will not take effect until July 1, 2025, the start of ICANN’s next fiscal year, according to ICANN.

“After more than a decade of no changes to registry-level and registrar-level fees, ICANN would like to increase the fees it charges to both parties,” Weinstein wrote.

The two cents tax increase is big in percentage terms — about 11% — while the registry fee is more in line with US inflation at 3.20%.

The fixed registrar accreditation fee is to stay the same at $4,000 per year, while the variable accreditation fee, which is divided between registrars based on their transaction volume, is going up from a total of $3.42 million to $3.8 million per year.

The increases come as ICANN struggles to fill a $10 million hole in its budget — a situation that has already led to layoffs — and some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest the combined fee increases are designed to raise annual revenue in that ball-park.

Due to the differences between the standard Registry Agreement and Registrar Accreditation Agreement, ICANN can push through the registry fee increases fairly quickly and unilaterally, while the registrar changes have some red tape.

The two-cent tax increase will be part of ICANN’s usual budget process, which includes a public comment period and consideration by the board of directors, while the variable fee increase will be subject to a registrar vote.

Note: an early, unfinished draft of this post was inadvertently published on Friday, for which I can only apologize.

2 Comments Tagged: budget, ICANN, prices, ra, raa