Two more dot-brands leave Verisign for GoDaddy

Verisign’s ongoing shedding of its registry back-end services clients continued recently, with two dot-brands moving to GoDaddy Registry.

The two gTLDs are .norton, the anti-virus brand which now belongs to Gen Digital, and .capitalone, the dot-brand for the financial services firm Capital One. Both recently updated their IANA records to show GoDaddy is now the technical contact.

The loss of .norton is perhaps notable because of Verisign’s shared history with the brand. Verisign allowed Symantec, then-owner of the Norton brand, to use the Verisign brand to sell SSL certificates for a few years following a $1.3 billion deal in 2010.

But Verisign has spent the last few years deliberately unloading its registry services clients onto its competitors. Other beneficiaries of this wind-down have included Identity Digital and Nominet.

GoDaddy counts cost of losing .co deal

GoDaddy has revealed how hard losing its .co registry back-end deal will hit revenue, but insisted that it has no plans to exit the registry business.

The company said in its second-quarter earning release that it anticipates “an approximate 50 basis point headwind to bookings and revenue” when the deal expires in the fourth quarter.

So that’s 0.5%, or about $6 million given GoDaddy’s quarterly revenue came in at $1.2 billion in the second quarter. CFO Mark McCaffrey said the loss will be “immaterial in and of itself” and will not prevent the company hitting its financial targets.

The loss of the .co deal (possibly coupled with the separate recent loss of the .in deal) inspired one analyst to ask executives whether the company has plans to exit the registry business, but McCaffrey said there was “no change in our philosophy”:

This was a one-off situation where we went out to rebid and the profitability metrics that were needed to continue in this relationship just weren’t there for us. So I would say it’s more on the strategy of our profitable growth and making sure we stay disciplined to our framework versus a change in philosophy

Dejargonizing this, it appears GoDaddy is saying “the other guys could do it cheaper”. In the case of .co, the other guys were Team Internet, which will receive 8% of .co’s gross revenue, versus the 19% GoDaddy was getting. (Update: Team Internet says in the comments that GoDaddy bid this time at 9%.)

For the second quarter, GoDaddy reported overall revenue up 8% at $1.2 billion and net income of $199.9 million, up 37% compared to the same quarter last year.

The “Core Platform” reporting segment, which includes domain name sales, saw revenue up 5% year over year to $753.7 million. Vanilla domain sales and aftermarket sales were both up 7%.

Team Internet loses Radix to Tucows

Tucows has scored a big win for its back-end registry services business, winning Radix and its portfolio of gTLDs over from rival Team Internet.

The companies said in a press release today that Radix will migrate its 11 TLDs, together comprising about 10 million domains, over to the Tucows platform.

This will bring Tucows’ total to about 17 million domains, following the migration of four million names in India’s .in, taking the deal from GoDaddy, which was the biggest single-TLD migration ever.

Radix’s portfolio comprises the 2012-round new gTLDs .store, .online, .tech, .site, .fun, .host, .press, .space, .uno and .website, as well as the Palau ccTLD .pw.

It’s a blow for Team Internet, which only recently boasted of winning the back-end business for Colombia’s .co, also from GoDaddy.

Tucows expects the Radix migration to go ahead in November.

presidenttrump.xxx among thousands of dead .xxx domains suddenly springing to life

Celebrities, politicians, tech bros, and hundreds of household brands are among the registrants of roughly 30,000 dormant .xxx domains that have suddenly awoke and found themselves live on the internet.

The sudden explosion of newly live domains happened around May 20, when .xxx registry GoDaddy made some technical changes to its .xxx database as a result of the TLD’s move from “sponsored” to open.

The move means names such as presidenttrump.xxx, presidentobama.xxx, elonmusk.xxx, kanye.xxx, jeffbezos.xxx, adele.xxx and scarlettjohansson.xxx are all suddenly real, resolving domains that could be configured to host web sites for the first time in a decade or more.

If they are defensive registrations, that’s arguably no big deal. If they are registered to third parties, the registrants are now free to throw up any AI-generated Rule 34 mischief they wish.

The .xxx zone file popped from around 6,500 domains to almost 36,000 by May 22, as GoDaddy lifted serverHold status from each affected domain. In the vast majority of cases, these will be domains defensively registered by brand owners, some as far back as 2011, or attempted cybersquats.

From launch until this year, .xxx was considered a sponsored gTLD. Anyone could register a domain, but the registry would keep the names dormant, non-resolving, and out of the zone file until the registrant applied for “Membership” of the porn community and obtained a special software token that their registrar could use to activate the domain.

Because .xxx is no longer a sponsored gTLD, the registry is sunsetting the token system. The current phase of this process has seen GoDaddy remove the serverHold status for domains where the registrant never bothered to obtain their token.

This means that the defensive domains are now discoverable via the zone file for the first time, revealing which brands considered themselves particularly vulnerable to cybersquatting.

Spare a thought for the registrant, presumably Big Three management consultancy Bain, which seems to have been spending north of four grand a year since 2012 sitting on this stash of domains:

bain-blows.xxx, bain-stinks.xxx, bain-sucks.xxx, bainbaingoaway.xxx, bainblows.xxx, baincapital-blows.xxx, baincapital-stinks.xxx, baincapital-sucks.xxx, baincapitalblows.xxx, baincapitaldestroysjobs.xxx, baincapitalfiredme.xxx, baincapitalhypocrisy.xxx, baincapitalkillsjobs.xxx, baincapitallies.xxx, baincapitalliesaboutjobs.xxx, baincapitallootsjobs.xxx, baincapitalscam.xxx, baincapitalscrewspeople.xxx, baincapitalscrewspoorpeople.xxx, baincapitalscrewsthepoor.xxx, baincapitalsteals.xxx, baincapitalstealsfrompoorpeople.xxx, baincapitalstealsfromtaxpayers.xxx, baincapitalstealsfromthepoor.xxx, baincapitalstealspensions.xxx, baincapitalstinks.xxx, baincapitalsucks.xxx, baincapitalventures.xxx, baincapitalvultures.xxx, baincausespain.xxx, baincrapital.xxx, baincrematesjobs.xxx, baindestroysjobs.xxx, bainfiredme.xxx, bainhypocrisy.xxx, bainkillsjobs.xxx, bainlies.xxx, bainliesaboutjobs.xxx, bainlootsjobs.xxx, bainscam.xxx, bainscrewedme.xxx, bainscrewspeople.xxx, bainscrewspoorpeople.xxx, bainscrewsthepoor.xxx, bainsteals.xxx, bainstealsfrompoorpeople.xxx, bainstealsfromtaxpayers.xxx, bainstealsfromthepoor.xxx, bainstealspensions.xxx, bainstinks.xxx, bainsucks.xxx, bainthepredator.xxx, bainvultures.xxx, bewareofbain.xxx, blamebain.xxx, boycotbain.xxx, boycotbaincapital.xxx, fuckbain.xxx, fuckbaincapital.xxx, gotohellbain.xxx, occupybain.xxx, occupybaincapital.xxx, puttheblameonbain.xxx, saynotobain.xxx, thehypocrisyofbain.xxx, thehypocrisyofbaincapital.xxx, therealbain.xxx, therealbaincapital.xxx

(In 2012, Bain was closely associated with Republican US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, its former CEO.)

The newly visible .xxx domains do not paint the full picture of defensive registrations in the gTLD. There are another roughly 8,000 registered .xxx domains that do not yet appear in the zone files, according to registry transaction reports.

There are also an unknown number of brands being blocked there, which do not show up in public records, as a result of GoDaddy’s AdultBlock and GlobalBlock services.

GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet

Team Internet is to take over back-end duties for .co, after agreeing to take less than half as much as GoDaddy was charging.

The London-based company has teamed up on a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia’s communications ministry, MINTIC.

The handover will put an end to GoDaddy’s 15-year stint as .co’s back end. The TLD was relaunched globally as a .com alternative in 2010 by .CO Internet, which was subsequently acquired by Neustar and then GoDaddy.

It seems Team Internet was willing to price its services much lower than GoDaddy. The company said in a statement that Equipo PuntoCo is getting 8% of gross revenue from .co sales, compared to the 19% GoDaddy was getting and the 93% .CO Internet originally received. The rest goes into the Colombian public purse.

While it’s not the biggest TLD on Team Internet’s servers (that honor goes to .xyz), it’s going to be the second or third largest migration of a single TLD between registry services providers in the history of the DNS.

.co had about 3.2 million domains at the start of the year. Today, Team Internet says it has “more than 3 million”. It’s the same ballpark as .au’s 2018 move from Neustar to Afilias, which was 3.1 million names, but a million shy of this year’s migration of .in from GoDaddy to Tucows.

When it comes to retaining the big ccTLDs, it seems GoDaddy really can’t catch a break.

Radix and Identity Digital also competed for the contract.

GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital

GoDaddy appears to have lost the last remnants of its Amazon back-end registry services deal.

IANA records show that GoDaddy was recently replaced by Identity Digital as the technical contact for all of the remaining 12 gTLDs it was serving.

The gTLDs in question are: .coupon, .song, .zero and the IDNs .ストア, .セール, .家電, .クラウド, .食品, .ファッション, .書籍, .ポイント and .通販, which are generic terms for things like “fashion” and “books”.

Five of the IDNs have actually launched and have been generally available for years, but they’re been phenomenally unsuccessful — the largest zone has just 146 domains in it. The remaining seven are dormant, unlaunched.

Amazon originally used GoDaddy (then Neustar) for all 54 of the gTLDs it successfully applied for back in the 2012 gTLD application round, but it switched all but 12 of them to Nominet back in 2019, where they remain today.

Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours

A screwup by MarkMonitor and GoDaddy was responsible for a two-hour outage affecting Zoom’s videoconferencing services yesterday, according to the company.

The widely used services were offline between 1825 and 2012 UTC yesterday because GoDaddy Registry, apparently acting under MarkMonitor’s instructions, shut down the zoom.us domain.

Screenshots posted to social media show zoom.us returning an NXDOMAIN error in web browsers. In-progress conference calls were reportedly shut off mid-stream.

Zoom said in a statement:

On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, network failure or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

It’s not entirely clear what is meant by “server block”, but it sounds consistent with a serverHold EPP status, where a registry prevents a domain from resolving in the DNS.

GoDaddy is the registry for .us domains. MarkMonitor is a hands-on corporate registrar dealing primarily with high-value brand clients.

Zoom is the incredibly popular conferencing service that grew to such popularity during the pandemic one could almost argue that it could be considered critical infrastructure.

While two hours downtime is hardly the end of the world, it’s still one hell of a screwup.

.co deal worth $77 million up for grabs

The Colombian government has put the contract to run .co out for bidding, and it looks like the successful registry could make as much as $77 million over the lifetime of the deal.

GoDaddy currently runs .co through its subsidiary .CO Internet, which it acquired when in bought Neustar five years ago. The government’s RFP does not rule out the incumbent reapplying despite some friction in the past.

It’s not simply a back-end registry services deal. The successful registry will have to be the public face of .co too, handling front-of-house services and marketing as well.

Extrapolating from some figures and formulas in the RFP, it seems GoDaddy’s share (19% of the total revenue) has worked out to about $7.7 million a year on average over the last five years. The new contract would be a 10-year deal.

But is .co on the decline? According to the RFP, the were 3,217,570 .co domains in January this year, down from 3.4 million in 2022 and 3.3 million in 2023. Numbers for 2024 were not included.

That downward trend may merely be the post-Covid slump experienced by many TLDs. Indeed, when the current contract was signed in 2020, there were just 2.3 million .co domains under management, so GoDaddy’s done a pretty good job of growing the namespace.

Largest back-end switch EVER as GoDaddy loses deal

It’s going to be the largest ever migration of a single TLD between back-end registry service providers, but it was announced without fanfare late last week.

On page four of Tucows CEO Elliot Noss’s prepared fourth-quarter remarks to analysts last week, he revealed the company has beaten GoDaddy to take over the contract to run India’s .in ccTLD:

Tucows Domains was recently selected to be the technical services provider for the .IN country code domain, operated by the National Internet Exchange of India. Our teams are closely collaborating and we are establishing a dedicated team in India to support this initiative

Noss said that the migration involves “approximately 4 million domains” and will take place “later this year”.

While NIXI does not publish its registration numbers, Verisign’s Domain Name industry Brief put .in at 4.1 million names at the end of 2024.

Even accounting for upwards rounding by Noss, 4 million names would make the migration the largest in the history of the DNS.

The current record was set in 2018, when Afilias (now Identity Digital) took over Australia’s .au from Neustar (now GoDaddy. There were 3.1 million names in .au at that time.

When Neustar/GoDaddy took over .in from Afilias/Identity Digital in 2019, it was reportedly because it had bid $0.70 per domain, undercutting the incumbent’s offer of $1.10

But, while the deal is surely worth many millions (maybe $10 million over five years if we guess at a $0.50 bid) to Tucows’ top line, it may not be especially profitable.

Noss said in his remarks to analysts: “The pricing and margin contribution for this piece of business is typical of a large, high volume customer.”

But a demonstrable track record of handling large migrations often comes up in registry RFPs, so the .in deal puts Tucows in a strong position in future contract opportunities.

Super Bowl a bit of a dud for .com?

Having two of its largest registrars advertising during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast doesn’t seem to have given Verisign’s declining .com flagship much of a boost.

According to numbers published on the company’s web site, .com has grown by about 30,000 domains in the last two days.

While that’s certainly not to be sniffed it, it’s well within the parameters of a normal day’s operation for .com. The TLD’s zone file shrinks more days than it grows nowadays, but five-figure daily upticks are not uncommon.

GoDaddy and Squarespace both took out 30-second spots during the Super Bowl. Both featured high-profile actors and had high production values, but neither mentioned domain names once.

GoDaddy’s focused on its Airo tool and Squarespace’s… goodness knows what that was all about.

Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos last week told analysts that the two commercials were a sign that its registrar partners are starting to focus more on customer acquisition, which should help .com return to growth.