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Four more dot-brands switch back-ends

Kevin Murphy, August 29, 2024, Domain Registries

Four dot-brand gTLDs have recently changed their back-end providers, according to the latest records, three moving away from Verisign.

US insurance company American Family Insurance has moved its .americanfamily and .amfam from Verisign to GoDaddy, as has AARP, a US interest group representing retired people, with .aarp.

Aquarelle.com Group, a French flower delivery company, has meanwhile switched from French ccTLD operator Afnic to London-based CentralNic (which is still Team Internet’s registry brand).

The AmFam moves are notable because while Verisign has for some time been getting out of the dot-brand back-end business, most of its clients have been migrating to Identity Digital.

I count seven gTLDs making the Verisign-GoDaddy switch, compared to 60 going Verisign-Identity Digital over the last couple years. Verisign is now down to a few dozen dot-brands.

The Aquarelle.com move is notable because it’s rare for a dot-brand to use a back-end in a different time zone that predominantly uses a different language, but Team Internet does have a footprint in France and other Francophone countries so it’s perhaps not wholly weird.

Three of the dot-brands are not heavily used — .aarp has three resolving domains that redirect to aarp.org, while .amfam has about 10 names in its zone that do not publicly resolve and .americanfamily has none.

You might infer from the name “Aquarelle.com” that the company is not a big believer in the dot-brand concept, but you’d be surprisingly wrong — .aquarelle has more than 50 domains that resolve to web sites without redirecting to traditional TLDs.

Non-profits worth $2.6 billion a year say .org price caps should stay

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2019, Domain Registries

Eight large US-based non-profits, several of them household names, have put their names to a letter demanding that Public Interest Registry should not be allowed to increase its .org registry fees beyond 10% a year.
Combined, these eight outfits have revenue of roughly $2.6 billion per year.
PIR’s fees are currently under $10 per domain per year. It has roughly 10.6 million names under management.
The organizations signing the letter are TV network C-SPAN, broadcaster NPR, conservation charity the National Trust for Historic Preservation, retired persons advocate the AARP, environmental groups the National Geographic Society, the Conservation Fund and Oceana, and disco legends YMCA of the USA.
In a joint letter, submitted as part of ICANN’s public comment period on the renewal of PIR’s .org contract, they write:

We agree with the current .org registry operator, the Public Interest Registry, that the .org gTLD “has assumed the reputation as the domain of choice for organisations dedicated to serving the public interest.” We have come to rely on this reputation to help distinguish the online presence of our organizations from the online presence of organizations that are not intended to serve the public interest. As nonprofit organizations, we also have come to rely on the certainty and predictability of reasonable domain name registration expenses when allocating our limited resources.

Sourced from Wikipedia and tax returns, here’s how much revenue these non-profits bring in per year:

  • NPR — $208 million (2016)
  • C-SPAN — $73.2 million (2014)
  • YMCA of the USA — $169.5 million (2017)
  • National Geographic Society — $188 million (2017)
  • AARP — $1.6 billion (2016)
  • The Conservation Fund — $238 million (2017)
  • Oceana — $53 million (2017)
  • National Trust for Historic Preservation — $62.9 million (2017)

Limited resources indeed.
The deadline for comments is midnight UTC tonight, about two hours from the dateline on this post.