Google adds .here and .eat to launch roster

Google has added the long-dormant gTLDs .here and .eat to its 2026 launch timetable, synchronized with the previously announced launch of .fly.

The company has told ICANN that it plans to runs its sunrise periods alongside .fly’s from September 1 until November 9, with general availability following immediately November 10.

All three gTLDs are expected to be open, with no eligibility requirements.

Google has had control over these domains for well over a decade. It’s perhaps informative that the application for .here talks up the potential for location-based services pointing to “the success of FourSquare and Groupon”, two companies whose stars are substantially less bright 14 years later.

.eat will compete against the likes of Identity Digital’s .cafe (which has roughly 25,000 names in its zone today), Punto 2012’s .rest (97,000 names), and Internet Naming Co’s .food (23,000 names).

Google names the dates for .fly launch

Google seems to have accelerated its launch plans for .fly, one of the 2012-round gTLDs it’s been sitting on for over a decade.

The company’s registry division has notified ICANN that it plans to open its mandatory sunrise period for .fly on September 1 and keep it open until November 9.

General availability for the gTLD, which according to its 2012 application will be open to all with no eligibility restrictions, seems to have been scheduled for November 10.

Earlier documentation filed with ICANN showed early 2027 launch dates.

The original application states that the namespace is intended for, as you might expect, airlines and the travel industry. As such, it would compete with the likes of .travel and .aero.

Google has already registered get.fly to itself, but the name does not yet appear to resolve.

Team Internet says domains business sale imminent

Team Internet expects to be able to announce the sale of its domains business in the next several weeks, coming at the end of a turbulent 2025 that saw revenue, and its share price, tumble.

The company — home to registry and registrar brands including CentralNic, BrandShelter, Moniker and domaindiscount24 — said of its Domains, Identity & Software (DIS) segment in a recent trading statement:

Discussions continue with selected parties regarding a potential disposal of the DIS segment, which the Board will pursue where it delivers fair value. While there can be no certainty that any transaction will be agreed, or as to its terms, the Board expects the outcome of the strategic review, including any agreement relating to a potential disposal of DIS, to be announced in the first half of Q3. Subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals, the Board expects any resulting transaction to complete during 2026.

That suggests a deal could be announced anywhere from this week to mid-August.

Team Internet got badly burned by Google after the advertising giant changed the way it allows parking companies to monetize domains in early 2025. Its revenue per thousand page views was cut in half, down by 51% to $34 million last year.

The company is now talking about a legal case against Google (which it did not name directly), saying it is “pursuing a substantial damages claim against a major technology company, arising from anti-competitive conduct”.

In its audited 2025 results, announced Friday, the company said its DIS segment was down 4% to $194.6 million, with adjusted EBITDA up 10% at $21.4 million as it pursued a strategy of squeezing more profit out of each customer rather than pushing volume.

The Search segments, most affected by Google’s antics, saw its top line down 59% at $222 million, with EBITDA down 84% at $9 million. Overall, Team Internet saw revenue down 40% at $481.9 million, with EBITDA down 54% at $42.7 million.

The company also disclosed that it has had trouble meeting its financial commitments to its lenders, but that it has come to arrangement to have the banks forgive the transgressions.

It plans to either refinance or use the proceeds from the DIS disposal to service its debts.

Team Internet looking to break up

The return of CentralNic? Team Internet this week announced that it is seeking to break up the company, selling off its various divisions to different buyers.

The move follows devastating changes to Google’s advertising services, which led to 200 layoffs and a $140 million drop in revenue in the first half of this year.

“We are in active discussions regarding the divestment or formation of strategic partnerships for substantially all parts of the business in separate transactions,” the company said in a statement to the markets.

The company said it has already received “a number of inbound approaches”, adding that “discussions are most advanced” for the sale of its Domains, Identity & Software segment, which includes its registries and registrars.

It’s not clear whether we’re talking about potential industry consolidation or another private equity deal. Google’s move scuppered the planned sale of Team Internet as a whole to a PE group in March.

Google turned off its Adsense for Domains this year, making domain monetization substantially more difficult. It’s been replaced by Related Search on Content, which requires content to function.

Team Internet said that other Google policies designed to improve the quality of advertising have also slowed down its transition to the new model. It’s looking at ways it can diversify its revenue sources.

Team Internet lays off 200

When Google tweaks its algorithms, people lose their jobs.

That seems to be the takeaway from Team Internet’s latest trading update, which includes the revelation that more than 200 employees, more than a quarter of its 2024 end-of-year headcount, have been laid off recently.

The blame was laid squarely with changes to Google’s advertising services, which already scuppered a deal that would have taken Team Internet private back in March.

Google said back then that its advertisers would be opted out of AdSense For Domains, the service that Team Internet used to monetise most of its parked domains, by default.

Team Internet has been migrating its domains to Google’s Related Search for Content, which shows context-relevant suggested searches on content pages, but it’s taking time to make the move.

The result of this is that the company made a lot less money in its first half. Revenue for the six months to June 30 was $263.9 million, compared to $409.7 million for the first half of 2024.

The company also slipped from profit to loss at the operating level, while adjusted EBITDA was $24.6 million, compared to $46.6 million a year ago.

Its Domains, Identity & Software division, which includes the CentralNic registry and registrars such as Key-Systems, saw revenue up a smidge at $103.9 million and adjusted EBITDA up 28.9% at $10.7 million.

The growth was driven by price, not volume. The number of handled domain reg-years was down by 4% to 12.9 million, while the average price was up 7% to $12.79.

Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”

Google is going to stop using country-code TLDs for its web sites around the world.

The company said today that “country-level domains are no longer necessary” because it’s become so good at localization that it doesn’t need to have search users visit their local ccTLD domain to figure out where they are.

All of its ccTLD sites will start redirecting to google.com over the coming months, Google said in a blog post. The only impact users will see is having to re-enter search preferences, it said.

The move is a bit of a blow, albeit a bearable one, to ccTLD registries, which will no longer have their brand associated with the internet’s most-popular web service. Google.com is already the most-visited domain in the world.

Google readying its next batch of gTLD launches?

Three more of Google’s stockpile of long-dormant gTLDs showed signs of activity recently, strongly suggesting the company may be preparing to launch them.

The domains get.eat, get.fly and get.here were all registered February 20, according to zone files and Whois records. While none yet resolve, Google typically uses “get” domains for its customer-facing registry web sites.

Other than nic.[tld] and domaintest.[tld], none of the three had previous registrations apart from .here, which had on.here registered back in 2016. That domain resolves for me, but to an infinitely reloading blank page.

Google is currently fresh from the launch of .channel, which went into general availability February 11 and currently has 1,451 names in its zone file.

Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning

A Norwegian private equity company has dropped its plans to acquire Team Internet after Google changed the way it handles advertising on parked domains, a key source of revenue for the company.

Oslo-based Verdane had a deadline of today to announce a formal offer for the company, but instead said it “does not intend to make an offer” because “there has been a material change of circumstances”.

While Verdane did not elaborate, there was a simultaneous announcement from Team Internet that Google’s recently announced changes to AdSense for Domains present a “challenge” that will harm its business faster than it can adapt.

Google said last week that as of March 19 it will start opting its advertisers out of AFD, the service domainers and registrars use to monetize many parked domain names. Advertisers will be able to opt back in, but are not expected to do so en masse.

Team Internet’s Search reporting unit made $72 million of its $91 million net revenue from AFD last year, which it expects to decline following the changes.

The company said it plans to instead monetize its domains using Google’s newer Related Search On Content product, which shows Google search results including paid results on the publishers’ own sites, based on the content of the page.

That presumably means Team Internet is going to have to populate its domains with spammy, low-quality and presumably AI-generated content, in order to trigger the RSOC contextual algorithm. Thanks, Google!

“The market development has been long-anticipated, though the announced acceleration is a challenge,” Team Internet told investors.

“It is anticipated that, during this transition period, contributions from AFD will decline faster than contributions from RSOC appreciate, meaning that the financial performance of Team Internet’s Search segment will see a trough in 2025 before it recovers from 2026 onwards and returns to the long-term pattern,” it added.

It expects adjusted EBITDA to more than halve for the year in its Search segment, from $57 million last year to between $20 million and $25 million this year. The company said its domains business, which includes its registry and registrars, should be unaffected.

But that domains business seems to be still up for sale. Team Internet said it has received “repeated approaches” for the domains unit and is carrying out a “comprehensive review of its asset ownership”.

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.

.ing doing way better than .meme

Google Registry launched two new gTLDs in December, and just over a month later one is doing way better than the other.

As of the latest zone files, .ing has over 16,000 domains, while .meme has just 2,700. Both went to general availability on December 5.

This might seem surprising, given that .ing is intended purely for domain hacks, but memes are of course ephemeral things where registering a matching domain might not be a sound long-term investment strategy.

Both Google launches pale in comparison to the registry’s most successful gTLD, .app, which sold over 250,000 names in its first month, May 2018.