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Freenom is back, but no longer free

Kevin Murphy, July 23, 2026, Domain Registries

Controversial domain registry Freenom has returned, barely two and a half years after Facebook owner Meta sued it into the ground in a massive cybersquatting lawsuit.

But the company seems to have abandoned the free domains business model it pioneered that led to spammers registering millions of abusive domains and huge reputational harm.

Freenom was — and appears to still be — the registry operator for .tk, the ccTLD for Tokelau. It also ran four African ccTLDs: Equatorial Guinea (.gq), Central African Republic (.cf), Mali (.ml), Gabon (.ga).

Today, its web site is offering domains in .tk, .cf and .gq for sale, with a starting price of €8.22 per year.

In 2023, Mali and Gabon moved their ccTLDs to away from Freenom, with .ga going to Afnic and .ml going in-house. It was reported that CAR and Equitorial Guinea had also severed ties, but that does not appear to be the case.

Freenom appears to be starting from scratch — while .tk at one point had over 40 million registered domains, today potentially high-value dictionary keywords are available again.

A DI reader confirmed that he was able to register a short, rather nice keyword .tk for the €8.22 base price earlier this week.

Many keyword domains I checked are also being offered without premium pricing, while others carry higher price tags. For example, football.tk is being offered for €86.08 and whiskey.tk is listed at €1,739.13, while vodka.tk carries the base price.

Domains such as facebooklogin.tk also appear to be available.

Freenom’s original business model saw it primarily give domains away for free, then seize them to monetize their traffic as they expired or, more commonly, were suspended for abuse.

Actually charging for domain names will certainly help reduce Freenom’s exposure to the kind of abuse that caused Meta to file a $500 million cybersquatting lawsuit against it in early 2023.

When Freenom settled the case a year later, it said it had “independently decided to exit the domain name business, including the operation of registries”. The move reportedly made a noticeable dent in the prevalence of cybercrime.

The company also lost its ICANN registrar accreditation, meaning it became unable to sell domains in gTLDs. It gTLD registrations were transferred to Gandi.

But now Freenom is back in the domain game, albeit seemingly with a different, more conventional business model.

Emoji domains get a 😟 after broad study

Kevin Murphy, October 28, 2019, Domain Tech

Domain names containing emojis are a security risk and not recommended, according to a pretty comprehensive review by an ICANN study group.
The Country-Code Names Supporting Organization has delivered the results of its 12-person, 18-month Emoji Study Group, which was tasked with looking into the problems emoji domains can cause, review current policy, and talk to ccTLD registries that currently permit emoji domains.
The ESG didn’t have a lot of power, and its recommendations are basically an exercise in can-kicking, but it’s easily the most comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding emoji domains that I’ve ever come across.
It’s 30 pages long, and you can read it here (pdf).
Emojis are currently banned in gTLDs, where ICANN has to approve new Unicode tables before they can be used by registries at the second level, under its internationalized domain name policy, IDNA 2008.
But ccTLDs, which are not contracted with ICANN, have a lot more flexibility. There are 15 ccTLDs — almost all representing small islands or low-penetration African nations — that currently permit emoji domains, the ESG found.
That’s about 6% of Latin-script ccTLDs out there today. These TLDs are .az, .cf, .fm, .je, .ga, .ge, .gg, .gq, .ml, .st, .to, .tk, .uz, .vu, and .ws.
Five of them, including .tk, are run by notorious freebie registry Freenom, but perhaps the best-known is .ws, where major brands such as Budweiser and Coca-Cola have run marketing campaigns in the past.
The main problem with emojis is the potential for confusing similarity, and the ESG report does a pretty good job of enumerating the ways confusability can arise. Take its comparison of multiple applications’ version of the exact same “grinning face” emoji, for example:
Emoji comparison
If you saw a domain containing one of those in marketing on one platform, would you be able to confidently navigate to the site on another? I doubt I would.
There’s also variations in how registrars handle emojis on their storefronts, the report found. On some you can search with an emoji, on others you’ll need to type out the xn-- prefixed Punycode translation longhand.
In terms of recommendations, the ESG basically just asked ICANN to keep an eye on the situation, to come to a better definition of what an emoji actually is, and to reach out for information to the ccTLDs accepting emojis, which apparently haven’t been keen on opening up so far.
Despite the lack of closure, it’s a pretty good read if you’re interested in this kind of thing.