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

As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.

2 Comments Tagged: .cn, .com, cnnic, new gTLDs, verisign

Second new gTLD contention set revealed

The first showdown between new gTLD application consultants D3 Global and Unstoppable Domains has emerged, with the announcement this week of a bid for a cartoons-themed gTLD by a D3 client.

D3 said in a press release it has partnered with outfits called Animecoin Foundation and Azuki to apply to ICANN for .anime, representing the Japanese art form, when the next application round opens a bit over a year from now.

Together, the two D3 partners provide a cryptocurrency designed to enable people to trade digital art NFTs, and the NFTs themselves.

But the expected .anime application is not the first to be publicly announced. Last June, Unstoppable said it’s planning to apply for .manga and .anime with a client called Kintsugi Global.

It’s the second likely contention set between publicly announced applicants. Freename.io and 3DNS have both separately announced bids for .chain, of course intended for blockchain-related usage.

The next application window is scheduled to open April 2026 or thereabouts. There are multiple ways contention sets can be resolved under the current rules, but the main one is expected to be an ICANN-managed auction.

4 Comments Tagged: .anime, .chain, .manga, 3dns, contention, d3, freename.io, ICANN, new gTLDs, unstoppable

UK intros global domain takedown law

The UK government has introduced legislation that would give police the power to order registries and registrars outside the country to take down domain names being used for serious crime.

The new Crime and Policing Bill (pdf), published yesterday, is a sprawling piece of proposed legislation, covering everything from mobile phone theft to antisocial behavior.

But it includes a section that would codify the police’s ability to demand domain names and IP addresses to be suspended for the first time.

The law would allow the police to ask a judge for a “domain name suspension order”, applicable for up to a year, where they believe the domain is being used to commit “serious crime”.

That’s defined as “the use of violence” or conduct that “results in substantial financial gain” or that would reasonably be expected to carry a jail sentence of three years or more.

Today, the UK police have voluntary relationships with local companies on takedowns. Nominet suspends many thousands of domains every year, most related to intellectual property crime, on the advice of police.

But according to the explanatory notes provided by the government, the law will not replace these deals. It says:

The government strongly supports these voluntary arrangements, and they will continue to be the first port of call for any activity in this space.

However, most domain name registries and registrars are situated outside of the UK and require a court order before they will action requests. These orders (an IP address suspension order or a domain name suspension order) will therefore primarily be served internationally, to ensure that any threat originating from outside the UK can be effectively tackled.

If overseas registries/registrars declined to enforce the court order, UK police could use “police-to-police cooperation and Mutual Legal Assistance” to get it done, the notes say.

The bill has to follow the usual parliamentary process before it becomes law.

Comment Tagged: .uk, nominet, police, suspensions, takedowns

No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat

ICANN’s country-code registries have picked their next representative for the ICANN board of directors.

Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA won the seat, which was vacated last September with the abrupt resignation of incumbent Katrina Sataki, who had already been reelected for a second term.

I believe Holland will join the board, after the formality of approval by ccNSO and the ICANN Empowered Community, immediately as Sataki’s replacement, rather that waiting for this year’s AGM as would usually be the case.

Holland comfortably beat Nick Wenban-Smith, general counsel of .uk registry Nominet, by 73 votes to 30 in a two-horse race described by one candidate as a disappointing choice between “two kind of middle-aged white guys and native English speakers”.

The election of a Canadian to replace a European as ccNSO representative means the ICANN board has topped out its quota of North Americans, which could have an impact on other election/selection processes.

ICANN’s bylaws state that each of the five geographic regions can have no more than five voting directors.

Directors Tripti Sinha, Sarah Deutsch and Miriam Sapiro all hail from North America. Term-limited Becky Burr, also American, is to be replaced later this year, but the shortlist of her replacement options are both also Americans.

This seems to mean that the Nominating Committee, charged this year with replacing term-limited European Maarten Botterman and renewing or replacing Sajid Rahman and Chris Chapman, both from Asia-Pacific, has had its field of candidates limited somewhat.

The Address Supporting Organization is also in election mode for its board seat this year, but neither of the candidates are North American.

2 Comments Tagged: board, ccnso, ICANN

Registries have started shutting down Whois

Nominet seems to have become the first major registry services provider to start to retire Whois across its portfolio, already cutting off service for about 70 top-level domains.

Queries over port 43 to most of Nominet’s former Whois servers are no longer returning responses, and their URLs have been removed from the respective TLDs’ records on the IANA web site.

The move follows the expiration last month of ICANN’s contractual requirements to provide Whois in all gTLDs. Now, registries must use the successor protocol RDAP instead, with Whois optional.

A Nominet spokesperson tells us the shut-off, which affects large dot-brand clients including Amazon, happened after consultation with ICANN and clients on January 29.

TLDs Nominet was supporting under ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program are also affected.

The registry spokesperson said that the gTLDs .broadway, .cymru, .gop, .pharmacy, and .wales are still offering Whois, due to an interoperability issue:

“The sole reason for the retention of these gTLD WHOIS services is for interoperability with the Brand Safety Alliance (BSA) service integration, which does not yet support RDAP,” she said.

The BSA is the GoDaddy-backed project that offers the multi-TLD GlobalBlock trademark-blocking service.

Nominet’s flagship .uk is also still offering Whois, because Nominet discovered that some of its registrars were still using it, rather than EPP, to do domain availability checks.

The fact that a GoDaddy service and some .uk registrars still don’t support RDAP, even after a years-long ICANN transition plan, is perhaps revelatory.

I’ll admit the only reason I noticed Nominet’s Whois coverage was patchy was that I’d neglected to update one of my scripts and it started failing. Apparently I was not alone.

While RDAP can be fairly simple to implement (if I can do it…), actually finding each registry’s RDAP server is a bit more complicated than under the Whois regime.

All gTLD registries were obliged to offer Whois at whois.nic.[tld], and IANA would publish the URLs on its web site, but RDAP URLs are not standardized.

It’s not super obvious, but it seems instead you have to head over to IANA’s “Bootstrap Service” and download a JSON file containing a list of TLDs and their associated base RDAP URLs.

9 Comments Tagged: amazon, ICANN, nominet, rdap, whois

ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist

An Independent Review Process panel has thrown out a case filed by a failed new gTLD applicant because the applicant was found to have not existed for almost seven years.

A Bahrain-based company called GCCIX had applied to run .gcc, for Gulf Cooperation Council, in 2012. Its bid was rejected by ICANN the following year on the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee because it had no affiliation with the actual GCC, a political grouping of nations in the Middle East.

GCCIX has been challenging the rejection ever since, filing an IRP against ICANN in 2021.

But it turns out GCCIX, which apparently had only one employee, has not legally existed in Bahrain since 2018, when it lost its corporate registration for reasons that still seem a mystery even to the IRP panelist.

This kinda scuppers the former company’s ability to do stuff like signing a contract to operate a top-level part of the internet’s infrastructure. Dismissing the case, the IRP panelist wrote:

The Tribunal determines that GCCIX’s status as company “deleted by law” precludes it from engaging in commercial activity under Bahrani law. Those commercial activities undoubtedly include entering into a Registry Agreement and providing the technical and other services required to operate a gTLD… GCCIX has not had the legal capacity to operate a gTLD since at least 2018 and has not revived its capacity despite having ample time to do so.

The question now is who has to pay for this debacle, which seems to involve somewhere between four and 12 years worth of legal fees and other costs. ICANN says it wants sanctions against GCCIX, too.

The panelist said that a decision on costs would have to be made by a full IRP panel, and it’s asked both parties to have a chat about whether they want one.

Comment Tagged: gccix. gcc. irp, ICANN, new gTLDs

.com could return to growth this quarter

Verisign might have some better news for investors and analysts when it delivers its first-quarter financial results — it looks like .com might have turned a corner and returned to growth.

The TLD has added over 540,000 domains to its zone file between the start of the year and February 20, a little over halfway through the quarter, according to the numbers Verisign posts on its web site.

While Q1 has historically been seasonally strong, in the same period of 2024 .com was down by over 63,000 names. Over the whole of 2024, .com’s zone lost 3.7 million domains.

The company recently introduced some registrar marketing programs that CEO Jim Bidzos earlier this month said he was encouraged by. Several registrars have been spotted selling .com first-years for as much as 50% off the regular wholesale price.

Two big registrars — GoDaddy and Squarespace — kicked off expensive ongoing campaigns advertising their web site building services at the February 9 Super Bowl broadcast in the US.

Since the broadcast, .com is up by 186,000 names.

Verisign is currently predicting its domain name base across .com and .net will shrink by between 2.3% and 0.3% for the full year.

Comment Tagged: .com, verisign