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.radio’s new owners might have a fight on their hands

Kevin Murphy, April 9, 2026, Domain Registries

Should gTLD registries that avoid costly auctions by promising to serve special limited communities be allowed to later change their business models to improve sales?

That’s the question being asked of .radio, which recently was taken over by a new owner and might be on track to liberalize its registration policies in the near future.

.radio is what is called a “Community” or “Spec 12” gTLD, meaning it has Specification 12 — which imposes eligibility and content rules on registered domains — in its ICANN registry contract.

Four organizations applied for .radio in 2012, but the European Broadcasting Union prevailed, avoiding a potentially expensive auction, by filing a Community application and winning a Community Priority Evaluation.

Afilias, Donuts and BRS Media — all commercial, non-Community applicants — lost out on their chances to run .radio, or make money losing a private auction, because of this successful CPE.

While .radio launched in 2017, it’s never had more than about 3,000 domains under management and earlier this year the EBU sold its contract to Digity, an emerging registry operator with ties to Sav.com.

The suspicion is that Digity is planning to abandon .radio’s community roots and make it more of a mass-market proposition.

That concern was recently expressed by Craig Schwartz, president of fTLD Registry Services, which runs the Spec 12 gTLDs .bank and .insurance, in a letter (pdf) to ICANN’s chair.

Schwartz noted that Digity, unlike the EBU, “appears to have no existing relationship with the originally stated radio community” and said that registries should not be allowed “to game ICANN by preferentially acquiring these assets under one premise and then blindsiding Registrants at a later date.”

ICANN should audit Spec 12 registries for community compliance and open to public comment any attempt to transfer ownership of the contracts, he wrote.

Schwartz reiterated these concerns during a call of the ICANN At-Large community yesterday, adding that ICANN should come up with a way to “wind down” failing Spec 12 gTLDs, rather than transferring them to a liberalizing successor.

He — saying he is supported by other community registries — appears concerned that if ICANN allows registries to play fast and loose with their original commitments, it could not only enable gaming but also tarnish the reputation of other Spec 12s such as .bank.

Consultant Michael Palage, on the same At-Large call, said the the “cheat code” for registries is to get their Spec 12 removed during bilateral negotiations with ICANN Org at the time of contract renewal. He pointed to the liberalization of GoDaddy’s .xxx as an example.

Probably not coincidentally, the current 10-year .radio Registry Agreement is due to expire this July and is currently up for renewal.

ICANN has yet to publicly respond to Schwartz’s letter.

Sav.com owner takes over .radio gTLD

Kevin Murphy, February 19, 2026, Domain Registries

The .radio gTLD appears to have changed hands, with a young registry affiliated with Sav.com taking over the reins.

ICANN documentation shows that Digity, a company led by Sav CEO Anthos Chrysanthou, took over the registry contract for the gTLD last month.

The original registry was the European Broadcasting Union, the entity behind the popular Eurovision Song Contest (.eurovision also exists, but is not used, with the EBU using a .vote domain during its annual broadcast).

Digity is already the contracted registry for .case, a former dot-brand it acquired from CentralNic a few years ago.

Apparently intended to be repurposed as a namespace for the legal profession, .case is yet to properly launch and has just a few dozen domains under management.

.radio, by contrast, if not exactly thriving in volume terms, is actually being sold and used, with about 3,000 DUM at a price point of just under $400 a year at the low end.

Some registration restrictions and pricing variations apply, and the gTLD does not have particularly broad registrar coverage.

British readers may be interested to learn that one of the highest-profile .radio domains belongs to oddball former DJ and TV host Noel Edmonds.

Three more straggler new gTLDs coming soon

Kevin Murphy, May 23, 2023, Domain Registries

Three more new gTLDs from three different registries are set to launch this (northern hemisphere) summer.

Identity Digital is gearing up to launch .watches in June, while newcomer Digity will launch .case in July and Intercap will launch .box in August, according to ICANN records.

.watches was bought from luxury goods maker Richemont, which hadn’t used it, in 2020. It’s currently in sunrise and will go to general availability June 7.

Digity, which is affiliated with the registrar Sav, bought .case from CentralNic, which in turn bought it from industrial machinery maker CNH Industrial. It was a dot-brand, but will be repurposed as an open generic targeting the legal field.

Intercap is planning to start .box’s sunrise August 9 and go to general availability the following month, September 13. The gTLD was originally bought for $3 million before Intercap acquired it in 2020.

CentralNic passes on abandoned dot-brand

Kevin Murphy, September 6, 2022, Domain Registries

CentralNic has sold on the dead dot-brand it acquired last year, to a company run by Sav.com’s CEO.

.case was originally owned by CNH Industrial, a large maker of industrial machinery, but it was sold off to CentralNic subsidiary Helium last year when the company dumped its portfolio of unwanted dot-brands.

I speculated at the time that it was acquired merely to be sold — Helium previously acted as an interregnum operators of .fans, and that turned out to be correct. CentralNic did nothing with it — the NIC page still shows images of diggers — and it has no registered domains.

The new owner is a company called Digity, whose president is Sav.com CEO Anthos Chrysanthou.