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.

.free domains to finally arrive as Amazon reveals three gTLD launches

Amazon Registry has revealed launch dates for three of its long-dormant gTLDs, and they have the potential to be the most popular of its patchy portfolio.

.free, .hot and .spot are to go to sunrise April 2, according to a notice on Amazon’s web site and paperwork filed with ICANN.

The Trademark Claims period, which pretty much always coincides with the start of general availability, is set for May 12.

Details of pricing and any possible registration restrictions have not been published.

All three gTLDs have been in the root since 2016, just sitting there doing nothing. Amazon has 54 gTLDs in total, 10 of which are dot-brands, but most of the generics remain stubbornly unlaunched.

Its half-dozen Japanese-script domains have been around the longest, but its biggest success to date has been .bot, which has about 14,000 names in its zone file.

Amazon launched .deal and .now last year but the former has yet to hit 10,000 names and the former still hasn’t hit 1,000.

Amazon had to pay off four other applicants for the right to run .free.

Amazon readying fashion and book gTLDs

Amazon appears to be dusting off two of its long-dormant gTLDs, targeting the books and fashion industries ahead of launch next year.

But it’s probably not worth getting too excited about if you only speak English. The TLDs are .ファッション (.xn--bck1b9a5dre4c), which is Japanese for “fashion” and .書籍 (.xn--rovu88b), which is Chinese for “books”.

Updated dates filed with ICANN show Amazon Registry is planning to take both to general availability in early November 2025. That’s not a typo, the dates really are over a year away.

No pricing or registration policy information is available.

The two TLD have both already carried out their mandatory sunrise periods — eight years ago — and currently have 50-odd names in their zone files, which all appear to be internal or sunrise registrations.

Amazon has 54 gTLDs, a mixture of dot-brands and generic terms, according to my database, but only nine generics have launched and only two have registrations measured in the thousands.

The company applied for its dictionary-word, product-category TLDs at a time when it thought it would be able to keep them a closed shop where it could keep all the domains to itself.

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.

Amazon to launch two new gTLDs this month

Amazon Registry is to finally launch two of the gTLDs it has been sitting on for the best part of a decade.

The company expects to take .deal and .now to sunrise later this month, with general availability following in September.

According to information provided by ICANN, sunrise for both runs for a month from August 22, followed immediately by a week-long Early Access Period and general availability at standard pricing September 30.

Both extensions have been in the root since 2016, parts of Amazon’s portfolio of 54 mostly unused gTLDs.

They’re the first English-language strings the company has launched since .bot, which came out with a controlled release in 2018 before loosening its restrictions last year. It has about 14,000 domains.

Similar TLDs to .deal and .now are already available from other registries, which may give clues to their potential.

The plural .deals is part of Identity Digital’s massive portfolio, selling at a $25 wholesale price, but it currently has fewer than 10,000 registrations, having peaked at 11,388 in May 2022.

.now might be the more attractive of the two. The disputed ccTLD for Niue, .nu, means “now” in Swedish and has about 220,000 domains under management.

Amazon and Google among .internal TLD ban backers

Google and Amazon have publicly backed ICANN’s plan to reserve the top-level domain .internal for private behind-the-firewall uses.

ICANN picked the string “internal” as the one that it will promise to never delegate to the DNS root, allowing network administrators and software developers to confidently use it with a lower risk of data leakage should the TLD come under a registry’s control in future.

The public comment period over its choice is coming to a close tomorrow, with a generally supportive vibe coming from the 30-odd comments submitted so far.

Notably, tech giants Amazon and Google have both filed comments backing .internal, with both companies saying that they already use the TLD extensively for internal purposes (Google in its Cloud services) and that to allow it to be delegated in future would cause big problems.

Some commenters niggled that .internal is too long, and that something like .local or .lan, both already reserved, might be better. Others wondered why strings such as .corp or .home, which are already effectively banned due to the high risk of name collisions, were not chosen instead.

Amazon planning new push into registrar market?

Amazon has kept a pretty low profile to date both as a registry and registrar, but there are reasons to believe it’s on the verge of becoming a more visible player in the market.

The e-commerce and web services giant has secured a second ICANN registrar accreditation and appears to be readying a new domain-focused web site.

The subsidiary Amazon Domain Registrar US LLC picked up its accreditation this week, and its official web site domain is domains.amazon, which was registered November 29.

The domain does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

Amazon already uses the dot-brand domain registry.amazon for its 50-odd new gTLDs, almost all of which remain unlaunched.

In the registrar market, Amazon’s subsidiary Amazon Registrar Inc has been accredited for well over a decade and has been taking registrations since 2015 as part of its Route 53 managed DNS service.

It’s not a conventional registrar storefront by any stretch — registrations seem to be available only via the management console used by existing Route 53 customers — but it has amassed over 1.3 million gTLD registrations so far.

So could domains.amazon become the newest player in the retail registrar market? Smaller registrars that cheered the exit of the Google brand from the registrar space may soon have a new big boy to contend with.

Amazon governments not playing ball with Amazon’s .amazon

Governments in South America are refusing to play nicely with Amazon over its controversial .amazon dot-brand.

Speaking at ICANN 74 in The Hague this morning, Brazil’s representative on the Governmental Advisory Committee said that ICANN’s decision to delegate .amazon to the retail giant a couple of years ago contravenes the multi-stakeholder process and is “incompatible with the expectations and sovereign rights of the Amazon peoples”.

Luciano Mazza de Andrade said that the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which is membered by the eight governments of the Amazonia region, wrote to Amazon in December to decline an offer to reserve a number of .amazon domains.

Amazon’s contract with ICANN contains a Public Interest Commitment that grants ACTO and its members one usable .amazon domain each, and 1,500 blocks overall for culturally sensitive strings.

The company had given ACTO a December 19 deadline to submit its list of strings, but it seems its members do not acknowledge the contract’s validity.

“Among other points it underlined that ACTO member states did not give consent to the process of adjudication of the .amazon top-level domain and that they did not consider themselves bound by said decision or the conditions attached to it including the above mentioned Public Interest Commitment,” Brazil’s rep said.

He added that “the adjudication of the top-level domain to a private company without our approval and authorization does not respect the applicable rules, expressly contravenes the multistakeholder nature of ICANN’s decision-making process of interest, and is incompatible with the expectations and sovereign rights of the Amazon peoples.”

ACTO has previously described the delegation of .amazon as “illegal and unjust”.

Amazon has a handful of live .amazon domains, which redirect to various services on amazon.com.

Amazon has started using hard-won .amazon

Amazon has started using its controversial dot-brand gTLD, .amazon.

Six domains — ads.amazon, alexa.amazon, echo.amazon, kindle.amazon, prime.amazon and primevideo.amazon — appear to have come online in the last month or so and all resolve.

Proponents of the dot-brand concept may be mildly disappointed to note that they’re all currently just redirects to the regular amazon.com site. There’s no .amazon branding in the URL bar.

The redirects do not appear to be geo-targeted. Even in the UK, I get punted to the US site.

Still, it’s a rare example of a gTLD in Amazon’s portfolio that’s actually being used. Others, such as .book, have been in the root for many years but have yet to launch.

You’ll recall that Amazon applied for .amazon in 2012 but it was not until last year that it was finally delegated.

The company encountered serious push-back from the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, representing the South American nations in the Amazonia region.

Amazon has offered each nation and ACTO itself the opportunity to register names for their own use in .amazon, but none have yet taken up the offer.

Amazon sold rights to .box gTLD for $3 million

Amazon relinquished its rights to the .box gTLD five years ago for $3 million, according to court documents seen by DI.

Amazon was one of two applicants for .box, the other being a company called NS1 (that’s the numeral 1; this has nothing to do with Network Solutions).

According to a complaint filed a couple of years ago that I came across today, Amazon agreed to withdraw its application, giving its rival an unobstructed shot at the gTLD, for $3 million.

It was a private settlement of the contention set and the payout was not publicly revealed at the time.

A $3 million deal puts .box in the same ballpark as public auctions such as MMX’s .vip and Johnson & Johnson’s (now XYZ.com’s) .baby.

While the deal is years old, I thought the data point was worth publishing.

NS1’s application suggests that its business plan was to offer registrants cloud storage services, along the lines of DropBox.

But the ICANN contract was sold to Intercap, which also runs .inc and .dealer, earlier this year. The plan now appears to be to operate it as an open niche gTLD, but no launch dates have been announced.

It’s not known how much the gTLD sold for second time around.