Kid-friendly domains could be reborn

With governments around the world increasingly looking at reducing the harmful effects on the internet on children, it seems child-friendly domain name projects may see a resurgence.

The US government’s new hunt for a registry operator for .us, launched this week, contains a fairly explicit call for whichever company wins the contract to “revitalize” the long-dormant .kids.us space.

And I’m aware of one potential new gTLD applicant that wants to apply for a regulated kid-friendly gTLD when ICANN opens up its application window at the end of the month.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in its .us RFP:

The Contractor shall offer one or more innovative approaches to revitalize the use of the kids.us domain that are consistent with its objective of providing a safe space on the internet for children age 13 or younger, as intended by the Dot Kids Act. In the event a decision is made to reactivate the kids.us domain without any changes to the Dot Kids Act or selection of alternative uses, the Contractor shall be prepared to maintain and operate the second-level kids.us domain as specified by the Dot Kids Act.

It’s not the first time NTIA has tried to get the .us registry operator — now GoDaddy, formerly Neustar — to exhume the .kids.us project, which was closed down in 2012 after fewer than 1,000 registrations and half a dozen active web sites. Prior attempts were unsuccessful.

.kids.us was created by US legislation in 2002, largely as a way for legislators could feel good about themselves in an era when the web was still quite new and frightening and a lot wilder than it is today.

But that was before the dawn of social media and smartphones, the two technology trends driving much of the political focus on child online safety in the 2020s.

At least one new gTLD applicant intends to apply for a child-friendly gTLD this year, known as The Reservoir Project or (preliminarily) the Child Online Safety Association, run by lawyer S Harrison Knudson. The gTLD in question would be .haven.

The early-stage concept would see the registry work patent-pending technology and with ISPs, which would charge customers service fees and split the profit with the registry.

There are already two kid-oriented gTLDs out there — .kids itself and the Russian-language .дети (“.children”).

DotKids launched .kids in late 2022 and has so far accumulated 6,368 domains in its zone file. That’s actually not bad for a niche new gTLD, and based on some of the most uncomfortable Google searches I’ve ever done it looks like the registry is doing a pretty good job of keeping the namespace clean.

.дети has been around longer but has sold fewer domains, with just 1,358 names in its zone file today.

Shrinking .us TLD is up for grabs

The .us ccTLD may change registry operators in the not too distant future, but the domain is currently on a fairly steep downward trajectory in terms of registrations.

There’s also no guarantee that a new operator, should one be selected, would necessarily lead to lower prices for registrants.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration yesterday put the .us registry contract out for bidding, with a May 18 due date for offers.

Only the bigger players need apply — NTIA said it will only entertain offers from companies currently managing over two million domains in a single TLD.

That narrows the field quite a lot — only 27 TLDs I have numbers for clock in over two million. Incumbent GoDaddy qualifies, as does Verisign, Identity Digital, and Public Interest Registry.

CentralNic, Tucows, and a handful of non-US ccTLD operators also would be technically eligible, but the NTIA has ruled out any provider that is majority foreign-owned. The successful RSP would have to be fully based on US turf.

But .us has seen its DUM decline in recent months. As of January, it stood at 2,175,340, according to NTIA documents. That’s down from a peak of 2,575,574 just six months earlier, a not-insignificant dip.

On the upside, this is a different type of ccTLD contract to the likes of .ai or .co — the US government doesn’t want a cut of registration fees. The registry gets to pocket the lot.

How much “the lot” is isn’t exactly clear. Prior to 2019, GoDaddy predecessor Neustar was charging $6.50 a year wholesale, but references to pricing are redacted from the current NTIA contract.

So there’s a different pricing dynamic here. Registries competing for the deal can’t rely on bribing the government with a bigger slice of the pie, and NTIA has let it be known that a lower fee is not necessarily a good thing.

The pricing model will have to be in the “public interest” according to the tender. The NTIA documentation states that it will have to balance “the accessibility of .us domains to qualified registrants” and “the safety and security of the usTLD”, adding:

Offerors are advised that the lowest registration fee for a .us domain may not necessarily be in the overall best interest of the administration of the usTLD. The Government may decide to award to a vendor with other than the lowest cost fee structure or other than the highest cost fee structure.

It’s quite possible that the US will choose to stick with GoDaddy, but it’s perhaps worth noting that the current contract still has one unexercised extension option that would let it run until 2029, rather than the current 2027 expiration date.

“Mad Dog” politician registers nazis.us, redirects to Trump admin site

An American Congressional candidate has registered the domain name nazis.us and redirected it to the US Department of Homeland security web site.

Independent candidate Mark Davis, whose Twitter handle is @MarkMadDogDavis, confirmed the move in a tweet, saying the Republican party has gone “full fascist”:

I’m a nobody.
A dad in red Florida.

And I’m the one who bought https://t.co/Z0CG11fDsB
Because the GOP went full fascist
and the democrat establishment still won’t name it.

I’m not a senator.
Don’t have a PAC.
Not a soul in power thought to actually raise hell.

So I did.
And…

— Mark Davis for Congress (@MarkMadDogDavis) January 16, 2026

If you’re wondering about whether that’s a tone befitting a would-be US Congressperson, it’s typical of his Twitter feed, which repeatedly insults his opponents as “MAGA morons” and generally lives in the depths of the same brainless rabbit hole originally tunnelled by Venezuelan president Donald Trump.

The Whois record for the domain show it was registered on January 13 and has “markdavisforcongress.com donate” listed as the registrant. But Davis, perhaps jokingly, had first tried to pass off nazis.us as being a US government registration.

He posted a video of himself typing the domain into his browser, showing the redirect to dhs.gov, perhaps unaware that his browser autocomplete drop-down revealed that nazis.us was in his own GoDaddy control panel.

The context for this stunt is of course the ongoing chaos in some Democrat-run cities, initiated by the Trump administration, which has seen armed, masked, and unaccountable ICE agents swarm the streets looking for non-white people to deport.

It’s perhaps comforting, if bewildering, that nazis.us was until last week still available for registration.

GoDaddy to offer domain blocking to people who don’t have trademarks

GoDaddy’s registry arm wants to offer registrants the ability to block others from registering their brands in other TLDs, even if they don’t own a registered trademark.

In what could be a game-changer for the industry, the company has proposed a service called Domain Options, which could allow registrants to eventually claim rights to their domain across dozens or hundreds of gTLDs.

“The service will allow registered name holders to prevent registration of certain labels,” GoDaddy explained in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request filed with ICANN just before Christmas.

“Labels will be an exact match of the registered name holder’s second-level domain name label,” the RSEP says. “The number of labels a registrant can protect under Domain Options is limited to the following: only exact match labels, and only for registered domain names held by the registrant.”

Simply put, if you have registered example.beer, you would be able to pay a fee to prevent other people from registering domains such as example.biz, example.cooking and example.photo.

The latest RSEP covers 34 GoDaddy-run gTLDs: .abogado, .beer, .biz, .blackfriday, .boston, .casa, .club, .compare, .cooking, .courses, .dds, .design, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .garden, .gay, .health, .ink, .law, .luxe, .miami, .photo, .rodeo, .select, .study, .surf, .tattoo, .vip, .vodka, .wedding, .wiki, .work, and .yoga.

But ICANN has already approved the Domain Options service for use in GoDaddy’s .horse gTLD, which was floated (presumably humorously) as a trial balloon earlier in December. The .horse contract has already been amended to include the service.

Registrants would be able to convert the blocked domains into actual registrations at a later date, or cancel the service altogether.

Third parties would also be able to request blocked domains to be unblocked through worryingly unspecified means.

Domain Options appears to be essentially a simplified clone of two-year-old GoDaddy-led service GlobalBlock, known in ICANN contractual parlance as the Label Blocking Service.

GlobalBlock enables trademark owners to pay substantial fees — from $6,499 a year at 101domain, for example — to block their marks across 710 extensions as a cheaper alternative to buying 710 defensive registrations at full price.

Registry pricing for Domain Options is not revealed in the RSEP, but it’s hard to imagine it enormously undercutting and therefore cannibalzing GlobalBlock.

Now that ICANN has given GoDaddy the nod for .horse, it seems inevitable that the other 34 gTLDs will also be approved, and I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a wave of similar RSEPs from other registries over the coming months.

GoDaddy launches “ultra-premium” domain marketplace

If you’re going to launch a marketplace for “ultra-premium” domain names, you couldn’t pick a better domain to launch it on than DomainNames.com, and that’s what GoDaddy has done.

Via its Afternic secondary market business, the site was officially announced today. GoDaddy is reaching out to investors who own a “category-defining .com, a rare two-letter gem, a single-word .com or .ai, or a numeric masterpiece”.

While the company says it’s invitation-only, it it’s also asking investors to submit their names for consideration via a form on the new site, so that’s probably only half-accurate.

It’s looking for names it reckons could fetch six-figure asking prices and above.

If you want to know what GoDaddy thinks is “ultra-premium”, consider that the 110 domain names listed at launch are almost exclusively one–English-word or two-character .com names, with a handful of one-word .ai domains thrown in.

Domains will be actively marketed by the service and sellers have to sign an exclusivity agreement with GoDaddy.

That said, the domains don’t seem to have custom landers. Visitors to the listed names are greeted with a variety of Afternic/GoDaddy parking pages, some of which even have buy-it-now prices listed.

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.