New .com contract could see ALL domain prices go up

Verisign will retain its power to increase .com prices by 7% a year, and prices in other gTLDs could well go up too, under a new proposed registry contract designed to help patch up ICANN’s budget.

The proposed .com Registry Agreement was posted for public comment this evening, and the pricing terms within could have broad implications for all registrants of gTLD domains.

For starters, as usual the deal lets Verisign raise .com prices, currently $10.26 a year, by 7% in the final four years of the six years of its term. This is an option Verisign has never failed to exercise in the past.

But the deal would also give ICANN the power, in its sole discretion, to raise the per-transaction fees Verisign pays it for each added, renewed, or transferred .com domain, in line with the latest US inflation numbers.

The fee is currently $0.25 per transaction, and it hasn’t gone up ever, as far as I recall.

The proposed text on inflation is pretty much the same as found in all post-2012 gTLD Registry Agreements, but adds a clause saying that ICANN cannot raise the .com fees unless it also raises fees in “multiple other registry agreements”.

Yet another clause strongly suggests that ICANN intends to exercise its existing right to increase its fees, again according to the US Consumer Price Index, across other gTLDs — presumably all of them — rather soon:

ICANN and Registry Operator hereby agree that if ICANN delivers notice of a fee adjustment to other registry operators after November 1, 2024 and prior to the Effective Date, ICANN may concurrently deliver such fee adjustment notice to Registry Operator, in which case the provisions of Section 7.2(d) shall be deemed to have applied at the time such notice was sent.

Translated, this means that ICANN can put Verisign on notice that its fees are going up even before the contract is signed, but only if it also raises the fees on other registries at the same time.

It’s difficult to imagine why this language is there unless it’s describing something ICANN is actually planning to do.

Unlike Verisign, other gTLD operators do not have regulated pricing, so any ICANN fee increase on them could very well be passed on to registrars and ultimately registrants with increased wholesale prices.

The new contract is being proposed a few months after ICANN laid off staff because its budget was $10 million light, and CEO Sally Costerton said the Org was “evaluating ICANN’s fee structure to ensure it scales realistically with inflation”.

Verisign, and .com in particular, is ICANN’s biggest single source of funding, contributing $47.3 million of its $145.5 million in revenue in its last fiscal year.

The proposed new .com contract and public comment opportunity can be found here.

5 Comments Tagged: .com, ICANN, pricing, registry agreement, renewal, verisign

Investing in .ad domains may be risky

Domain investors may shoulder additional risk when they register domains in the relaunching .ad TLD, judging by the registry’s new cybersquatting policy.

Andorra Telecom, which will make .ad names generally available globally October 22, has signed up with WIPO to implement an adapted version of the UDRP that is a lot less friendly to domainers.

The new adDRP specifically calls out domaining as an example of “bad faith”, something a complainant must prove if they want to seize a domain matching their trademark. Panels can find bad faith if they see:

circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to another person for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name

The adDRP also tweaks the usual three-pronged cybersquatting test found in UDRP to make it easier for complainants to get a win, by lowering the evidential bar on registrants’ rights.

Instead of having to prove the registrant has “no rights or legitimate interests” to the domain, adDRP complainants merely need to “declare” that, “to the best of the Complainant’s knowledge”, the registrant has no rights or legitimate interests.

The adDRP also broadens the types of intellectual property rights complainants must have from registered trademarks to, for example, famous personal names and geographical names related to Andorra.

Andorra Telecom announced its relaunch, assisted by Fundació puntCAT and CORE Association, a few months ago. GA pricing is expected to be €15 ($16) a year.

While Andorra is among the world’s smallest nations, its ccTLD is of course an abbreviation of “advertisement” or “advertising” in English and therefore may have broader appeal.

The registry recently launched an English language version of its web site and a bunch of registrars serving the Anglophone market are already signed up.

The plural gTLD version, .ads, belongs to Google but has not yet launched.

Comment Tagged: .ad, addrp, andorra telecom, cybersquatting, trademarks, wipo

Plurals ban policy handed to ICANN board

The GNSO Council has approved a blanket ban on singular and plural versions of the same word being delegated as gTLDs in future and passed it to the ICANN board of directors for final consideration.

The proposed policy would prevent anyone applying for the singular/plural equivalent of an existing gTLD, and would put future applications for single/plural clashes into contention sets where only one would survive.

The ban would prevent a future .kitchens, for example, because there’s already a .kitchen, and there could be no .motorcycle gTLD because there’s already a .motorcycles.

It would also mean that if there are future applications in the same round for .podcast and .podcasts, for example, they would be placed in the same contention set, likely go to auction, and only one would be delegated.

Applicants would also be banned from applying for singular/plural variants of the few dozen strings found on a “limited blocked name list” that comprises mainly the names of internet policy organizations including ICANN, the IETF and the GNSO.

That list also includes dictionary words such as “onion”, “invalid”, “test”, “internal” and “local”, so there could never be a .onions or .locals gTLD under the policy.

ICANN would decide whether two strings are “the singular or plural version of the same word in the same language” by reference to a dictionary.

The idea behind the ban is mitigating abusive registrations that could be used in, for example, phishing attacks, as well as lazy gTLD applicants that might hope to piggyback on the success of their single/plural rival.

The policy recommendation was written by a “Small Team Plus” of 15 community volunteers after the ICANN board last year rejected the GNSO’s original singular/plural policy, which would have made exceptions to the ban based on the applicant’s “intended use” of the gTLD.

An example given was that if one applicant applied for .spring to represent the meteorological season and another applied for .springs to represent flexible coils of metal, the latter would not be judged a plural of the former.

But the board was worried that if ICANN had to make a call on “intended use”, ICANN would also have to monitor and enforce the use of the gTLD in future, breaking its bylaws promise not to regulate internet content.

Under the revised policy recommendation, .spring and .springs would be ruled as singular/plural equivalents of each other, regardless of how they were going to be marketed.

While the Small Team was not unanimous in its consensus recommendation, the GNSO Council was unanimous in approving it at its monthly meeting last week. The language will now be sent to the ICANN board for approval or rejection.

1 Comment Tagged: gnso, ICANN, new gTLDs, plural, string confusion

Three .now domains sell at premium EAP prices

Amazon’s Early Access Periods for the new .now and .deal gTLDs have so far netted at least three premium-priced sales.

Zone files reveal that so far .now has three new EAP domains but .deal has none.

The .now domains are, perhaps predictably, porn.now and news.now, which were both registered via Gandi, and free.now, which was registered via Secura.

All three were registered shortly after 1300 UTC yesterday, when the switchover from day one to day two pricing occurred, according to Whois records.

That means they likely sold for in excess of $3,300 each, judging by the EAP retail price list published by 101domain. Day one pricing would have been roughly double that.

Amazon may have sold more EAP domains that for one reason or another don’t yet show up in the zone files.

Regular general availability pricing kicks in at the weekend.

1 Comment

ICANN confirms new gTLD application fee

It’s $227,000. That’s the minimum ICANN expects to charge for each new gTLD application in the Next Round.

The Org confirmed the price, which is $42,000 more than it charged in 2012, in a blog post this afternoon.

It’s toward the low end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range discussed in June, but up on the $220,000 number being circulated a few weeks ago.

ICANN is able to put a tentative price on applications now because its board has now squared away all the outstanding policy items that could have substantially affected its evaluation costs.

That includes its new process for evaluating potential name collisions, which I wrote about just a few hours ago.

The fee is based on an estimate that ICANN will receive 1,500 applications, where $227,000 will allow it to recover its development, implementation, and operations costs. It may issue rebates if there are more applications.

The $227,000 fee is just a baseline. Applicants will be expected to pay more for extra services, such as if they want a Community Priority Evaluation or want to operate a dot-brand, ICANN said.

ICANN has previously said that most of the price increase over 2012 is due to inflation. But this hasn’t stopped grumbling that the fee is too high, given efficiencies such as technical back-end operations being evaluated separately.

Less well-financed wannabe applicants from certain countries — mostly outside Europe and North America — will have the chance to apply for a fee subsidy under the Applicant Support Program.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs

New gTLD application fee rises by thousands after collision call

ICANN has upped its expected new gTLD application fee after approving a costly new plan to tack name collisions.

The baseline price of applying for a single string, most recently pegged at $220,000, is now expected to go up by $5,000, according to a recent resolution of the ICANN board of directors.

The board earlier this month approved the Name Collision Analysis Project Study 2 Final Report, which proposed a way to prevent new gTLDs seriously interfering with existing non-standard TLD use on private networks.

Strings applied for successfully in the 2012 round had to agree to a 90-day post-launch period of “controlled interruption”, during which the entire gTLD was wildcarded with information to help affected parties fix their DNS configuration.

So if a company had been using .horse on its internal network, and a suddenly-delegated .horse gTLD started causing leakages to the public DNS, the company was quickly alerted to what the problem was.

Under the now-approved NCAP 2 plan, ICANN will take over responsibility for controlled interruption. Applied-for strings will be tested in the live DNS before a registry has even been contracted.

The results would be assessed by a Technical Review Team and applicants for strings considered at high risk of collisions would be able to submit mitigation plans for evaluation before having their registry contracts approved.

While approving NCAP 2 will generate more confidence that the Next Round will in fact go ahead in the second quarter of 2026, this extra stage of course will add friction and cost to the evaluation process.

ICANN estimates it will add $500,000 to its program implementation budget and $6.9 million to the application processing budget, increasing the application fee by $5,000 per application. That seems to assume 1,500 applications being submitted.

The likely increase has been flagged up for months, so is unlikely to surprise potential applicants, but will not appease those already grumbling that the fee has gone up so sharply from the $185,000 charged in the 2012 round.

It’s also bad news for companies that applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012, which were rejected due to the high risk of collisions.

The ICANN board rejected NCAP 2’s recommendation that these three gTLDs should be submitted to the new Name Collision Risk Assessment Process, potentially reawakening their applications from their Not Approved status.

Under the latest board action, anyone who applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012 will have no preferential treatment if they apply for the same strings again in 2026, according to the resolution.

Affected applicants were already offered a full refund for their rejected bids, with only deep-pocketed Amazon and Google so far not exercising that option. Now they have no excuse.

1 Comment Tagged: collisions, ICANN, ncap, new gTLDs, next round

Former .co registry defeated in $350 million contract fix case

The Neustar spin-off that once operated the .co TLD reportedly has lost a case against the Colombian government in which it had sought $350 million in damages over the acrimonious renewal of its registry contract.

According to local reports, the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, part of the World Bank, last week ruled in favor of Colombia on both the merits and on jurisdictional grounds.

The case had been brought in late 2019 by Neustar, which at the time managed some 2.3 million .co domains, under government contract, via a Colombian subsidiary it acquired in 2014.

Neustar has since been acquired by GoDaddy, which continues to run .co, but the ICSID case was inherited by Vercara, the DNS security services arm of the company that GoDaddy didn’t buy.

As .CO Internet, Vercara was hired by Colombia to turn .co into a global alternative to .com with a much-hyped 2010 relaunch. It was very successful, but when it came time to renew the initial 10-year contract, Colombia instead put it out for rebid and started behaving very strangely.

You may recall from coverage here on DI and on The Register that the Colombian tender process seemed to have been specially constructed so that only Afilias, then Neustar’s fiercest rival and now part of Identity Digital, could win.

The government’s RFP had set technical thresholds, such as daily registry transactions, that Afilias could show it met but Neustar could not. It looked naive and arbitrary at best and dodgy at worst.

So Neustar took Colombia to arbitration with ICSID, saying (pdf) the government was in breach of the Trade Promotion Agreement between the US and Colombia.

Neustar ended up winning the contract anyway, albeit on terms that were massively more favorable to the government, and it sold its entire registry services business to GoDaddy days later.

Now, almost five years later, it seems Vercara has lost the case it inherited. While ICSID has not yet published its arbitration panel’s decision, local newspapers have got hold of a copy.

Colombia’s oldest newspaper, El Spectador, reports: “The court, in addition to stating that it does not have jurisdiction to hear Vercara’s claims, rejected all the claims on the merits.”

In unrelated news, Vercara’s recently announced acquisition by DigiCert closed yesterday.

Comment Tagged: .co, .co internet, afilias, colombia, godaddy, identity digital, neustar, vercara

Is this the first Next Round new gTLD contention battle?

It had to happen sooner or later. With a few dozen would-be new gTLD applicants breaking cover over the last year or so, we seem to have our first clash and our first potential 2026-round contention set.

The sought-after contested gTLD is .chain, which now has two announced hopefuls after blockchain-based alternative naming system Freename.io yesterday revealed it wants the string.

“The company intends to apply for .chain, .token, .metaverse and a variety of other gTLDs,” Freename said. “Freename will also submit applications on behalf of third-party customers in this new gTLDs round.”

Freename, if it follows through, is likely to face competition from at least one other applicant, a company called 3DNS, which in June announced plans to apply for .chain and .super.

3DNS has Intercap as its registry partner, while Freename is partnered with registry ShortDot on a joint venture called WebUnited.

Freename already sells blockchain-based names that use .chain as an extension, while 3DNS sells third-level DNS domains under .chain.box that it hopes to upgrade to second-level names should it win the ICANN contest.

In truth, I’d be incredibly surprised if these are the only two companies to apply for .chain, which is a shortened version of “blockchain” and likely to be an attractive string with the whole crypto/”Web3″ crowd.

Under ICANN’s under-development rules, the exact process for resolving contention sets is still up in the air, with more clarity hoped for over the next few months.

ICANN has confirmed that it intends to ban private auctions in the next round, but has also come up with a new second-choice alternate string option that is already causing grumbling in the policy-making community.

1 Comment Tagged: .chain, 3dns, blockchain, crypto, freename, intercap, shortdot

ICANN names its Supreme Court judges

ICANN has finally named the members of the quasi-judicial body that will oversee its highest accountability mechanism.

The names of the 12 members of the Independent Review Process Standing Panel were published by ICANN this afternoon and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, which manages the IRP, published their resumes.

They’re mainly lawyers and law professors with extensive arbitration experience. There’s one African, and the rest are either North American or European; none are from Asia or Latin America.

The Standing Panel has been a long time coming. It’s been over a decade since ICANN first said it would create one. The jurists were picked by a community committee in January, but ICANN wanted to get them all contracted and up to speed before naming them.

The idea is to streamline IRP, which currently is barely distinguishable from the judicial system when it comes to duration of cases, by allowing ICANN and complainants to select their panel from a known pool of trained, experienced, vetted experts.

The IRP is the final formal appeals mechanism within the ICANN process before lawsuits start flying. There’s been over 20 filed in the last 16 years, and ICANN’s win-to-loss ratio is not great.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, irp, standing panel

Who uses Sunrise nowadays? You might be surprised

Sunrise periods may have been one of the unexpectedly damp squibs of the new gTLD program, but each launching registry is still obliged to run them and they usually attract a hundred or so registrations, some quite surprising.

Amazon’s sunrise periods for .deal and .now closed yesterday, ending with about 160 domains in each, so I thought I’d have a trawl through each zone file to see who’s mad-keen on protecting their trademarks online nowadays.

Excluding registered variants (with and without hyphens, for example), brands under the control of a single parent company, and domains registered to Amazon itself, I’d say there were fewer than 100 actual registrants in each sunrise.

With that in mind, you might expect only the most valuable, most at-risk brands to have participated.

Big tech firms — Meta, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, AOL, Baidu, etc — which are particularly at risk of phishing attacks, have indeed all snapped up names matching some of their famous marks.

Brands that might have a higher risk of counterfeiting, such as fashion and beauty brands like Maison Margiela, L’Occitane, Patagonia, Richard Mille, and Rolex all make an appearance in the zones.

But there are plenty of sunrise registrants whose appearance got me scratching my head.

Perhaps the weirdest registrant is SuperSigns, a sign-maker that appears to operate out of a single location, the size of a typical convenience store, between a Toyota dealership and a Dunkin’ Donuts on a small strip mall in Arizona.

La Famiglia Rana is a brand of ready-made supermarket pasta products that has registered at least three domains in each gTLD during sunrise.

Mars didn’t register mars.now or mars.deal, but its subsidiary did register championpetfoods.now.

CooperVision makes contact lenses and it registered both of its exact matches.

Delsey makes luggage. Danfoss makes electrical components. Nedgia distributes natural gas in Spain. Lechuza makes self-watering plant pots. Invisalign makes dental braces. They all participated in sunrise.

And we all know how mad the Americans are for the sport of polo, which is perhaps why The United States Polo Association chose to snap up uspoloassn.deal before somebody else did.

It’s certainly an eclectic mix, with no readily apparent common theme, but each registrant presumably has its own good reason for buying sunrise matches, even if that reason was simply telling its registrar: “Register everything!”

.now and .deal enter their Early Access Period of general availability today and go to standard pricing at the end of the month.

Comment Tagged: .deal, .now, amazon, sunrise