Identity Digital acquires another gTLD

Identity Digital has bulked out its already substantial portfolio of gTLDs, taking over the ICANN registry contract for another 2012-round string earlier this month.

The company is now running .onl via a newish affiliate called Jolly Host, according to ICANN records. It had been managed by Germany-based iRegistry, the original applicant.

.onl — short for “online” but with substantially fewer registrations than .online — had just shy of 24,000 registered names in its zone file today, but has been experiencing fairly consistent growth over the last few years.

It had 19,787 domains under management at the end of October, a lifetime peak.

Some of the growth may be due to the sub-$4 first-year fees currently being charged by some registrars. I believe the registry annual renewal fee is around $10, but some registrars mark that up to $25-$35.

.onl appears in the storefronts of most major registrars already.

Seven dead registrars on the out

When a registrar stops paying its registry partners, they tend to be cut off relatively quickly. ICANN takes a bit longer.

That seems to be what’s happening to a collection of accredited registrars under the same ownership, which have been given just a few weeks to pay over a year’s worth of overdue ICANN fees or lose their ability to sell names.

ICANN Compliance is gunning for Haveaname, InstantNames, MisterNIC, NetEstate, Neudomain, OpenName, and TopSystem for non-payment of fees going back at least to September 2024.

Probably not coincidentally, that’s the same month that all seven registrars abruptly lost all of their domains under management — not much more than 1,000 per registrar — and apparently lost its .com accreditation.

According to the ICANN notice, Compliance spent the last few months of 2024 unsuccessfully attempting to get in touch with the registrars, before ignoring the case for the whole of 2025 and only returning to it this month.

The registrar web sites are all simple placeholders, with broken SSL certs, doing the bare minimum to stay in compliance with the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement without actually attempting to sell any domains.

While almost all ICANN Compliance breach notices contain an allegation of unpaid fees, this is a rare instance where the allegations stop there; there’s no claim of any other breach.

Two former ICANN directors want back in

Gluttons for punishment? ICANN’s At-Large Community has named the first four candidates standing to join the Org’s board of directors, and two of them have form.

Sébastien Bachollet, Justine Chew, Maureen Hilyard and Lito Ibarra have all put themselves forward to replace term-limited León Sánchez, who is due to leave seat 15 of ICANN’s board in October after nine years’ service.

Bachollet and Ibarra are both former ICANN directors. Bachollet served as an At-Large appointee for four years from 2010. Ibarra served six years as a Nominating Committee appointee from 2015.

France-based Bachollet is the former chair of EURALO, the Regional At-Large Organization for Europe, and a former director of Afnic, the French ccTLD registry.

Malaysia-based lawyer Chew has extensive experience both on the At-Large Advisory Committee and the GNSO, as ALAC Liaison, and policy-making groups. She also has sat on the boards of Malaysian non-profits.

Hilyard, from the Cook Islands, is a former ALAC chair who has held senior board or advisory positions with Public Interest Registry and DotAsia and ISOC. The NGO she leads, the Cook Islands Internet Action Group, plans to apply for a new gTLD this year.

Ibarra has been in charge of the El Salvador ccTLD registry for over 30 years and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He has sat on the boards of LACNIC and LACTLD.

At-Large has a complex structure and its electoral system reflects that, but essentially the nominees were self-selected and confirmed by a committee. The ALAC will vote with a view to announcing the successful candidate before April 22.

“Lowest Price Guaranteed!” $48 .com registrar canned

ICANN has terminated its second registrar of the week, ending the accreditation of Hong Kong-based 0101 Internet for non-payment of fees and other infractions.

The registrar, not to be confused with the unrelated 101 Domain, will lose its ability to sell gTLD domains January 29, according to a public ICANN termination notice.

The company’s roughly 1,200 gTLD domains will be transferred to another registrar, a procedure complicated by the fact that ICANN also alleges that 0101 Internet has not been escrowing its customers’ registration data as required.

The Compliance notice spells out a timeline of alleged non-responsiveness to ICANN’s emails, phone calls, mail and faxes dating back to March 2003, almost three years ago.

0101 Internet’s web page proudly declares “Lowest Price Guaranteed!”, with .com, .net and .org priced at a measly $47.88 each, which might explain why the company’s DUM has been tumbling for over a decade.

No RDAP? No accreditation

ICANN has terminated its contract with another registrar after the company failed to implement RDAP, the Whois replacement protocol.

US-based Brennercom will be de-accredited January 28, according to a published ICANN Compliance notice.

The headline infraction is the fact that Brennercom failed to migrate to RDAP, but as is often the case the registrar owes ICANN money and has failed to publish some administrative details on its web site.

ICANN will now move Brennercom’s registered domains to a different registrar under its usual transition process.

That shouldn’t take long. While Brennercom’s web site claims to have handled customers with thousands of domains in their portfolios, my records show it has never had more than 133 domains under management. Right now, it has about 40.

Fifth-largest gTLD not dead after all

ICANN has assured users of its zone file distribution service that the .top gTLD is not dead, after an unspecified snafu earlier this week suggested it was.

On Wednesday, users of the Centralized Zone Data Service received an automated email stating: “Your zone data access for .top has been revoked… Reason: Request revoked as TLD has been made inactive.”

That would be a pretty big deal, as .top is the fifth-largest gTLD by volume and the second-largest new gTLD after .xyz, with something like 5.7 million names in its zone.

It might also carry a ring of truth for CZDS users who don’t track ICANN activities very closely, as .TOP Registry has recently been on the Compliance naughty step over DNS abuse allegations.

But affected users were assured yesterday that .top is not inactive and that an “issue” was to blame.

An email read: “an issue that temporarily marked the .TOP generic top-level domain (gTLD) as inactive… As a result, your previously approved CZDS access request for the .TOP zone file was revoked.”

The email goes on to say that users can wait for their access to be restored “in the next few days” or manually initiate a new CZDS request for the .top zone, which requires approval from the registry.

Half of registrar’s domains are abusive, ICANN says

A fast-growing registrar seems to be experiencing its growth spurt due to extremely high levels of DNS abuse, including phishing, according to the latest public breach notice from ICANN Compliance.

More than half of Bulgarian registrar MainReg’s domains under management are abusive, judging by the notice, which alleges MainReg’s unwillingness to investigate abuse reports in violation of its accreditation contract.

The notice is the first I can recall seeing that cites data from Domain Metrica, an ICANN service that aggregates abuse data from third-party block-lists. An unspecified third-party reporter (hands up in the comments if it was you!) is also cited.

“ICANN Domain Metrica data indicates that in November 2025 approximately 48% of MainReg’s DUMs were reported for phishing, with the figure at 45% as of 5 January 2026,” the notice says.

“The complaining party stated that its own independent analysis identified an even higher proportion of the Registrar’s DUMs engaged in scam‑related activity,” it adds.

MainReg isn’t a huge registrar, but transaction reports show that its DUM tripled between September 2024 and September 2025, from about 10,000 names to about 30,000. The company registered its first name in 2015. Almost all of its names are in .com, .net and .org.

The notice alleges other breaches, such as failing to migrate from Whois to RDAP, and gives MainReg until January 28 to come in compliance or risk termination.

Refunds galore as gTLD losers finally bow out

There’s been a wave of withdrawals of new gTLD applications over the last couple of months after ICANN gave 15 companies their final notice that it was time to ask for a refund or lose their money forever.

But so far just seven unsuccessful applications from the 2012 round have been withdrawn, from the 19 that were eligible, according to my records.

Notably, all of the remaining applications for .mail, .corp and .home, strings that were banned on account of name collision risks, have been pulled. Google, Amazon and GMO Registry will all get partial refunds of their application fees.

Two applications for the fiercely contested .hotel have also been yanked, with Identity Digital and Radix getting their refunds. GRS Domains, Despegar and Fegistry still have not withdrawn, according to ICANN records.

ICANN had classed .hotel as a “already been delegated to other applicant” gTLD, which isn’t completely accurate. The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, however.

There are plenty of other applications from 2012 that have not been withdrawn, despite the fact that the gTLD in question is already live and freely available for registration.

L’Oreal, for example, is still clinging on to its bid for .salon, despite the fact that Identity Digital has been running it for years and has about 4,000 names in its zone.

Similarly, Planet Dot Eco, DotConnectAfrica and Commercial Connect do not appear to has asked for refunds for their respective bids for .eco, .africa and .shop, despite all three being live and run by successful rival applicants for years.

Asia Green IT System has not withdrawn its bids for .islam, .halal, and .persiangulf, which were banned following government objections. AGIT was essentially kicked out of the industry when its business with five other Middle-East themed gTLDs comprehensively failed.

The 2012 round’s most-stubborn applicant, Nameshop, still has a live bid for .idn. Indian conglomerate Tata has also not pulled its bid for .tata, which failed on geographic similarity grounds.

In a resolution passed last September, ICANN’s board decided to give all of its remaining 2012-round applicants 90 days notice that they could withdraw or lose their money. It’s not clear when that 90-day period began.

.goo terminated as search engine closes down

The .goo gTLD is among a pair of dot-brand gTLDs to recently self-terminate.

goo was a 1990s-style search portal focused on the Japanese market and owned by local incumbent telco NTT. It eventually lost relevance and finally closed down for good at short notice last November.

Despite the similar branding, goo was unrelated to Google and in fact predated Google’s foundation by about a year, according to some accounts. It eventually turned to Google to power its search functionality.

NTT has asked ICANN to terminate its .goo registry contract and ICANN has given it the nod.

There was one active .goo domain, www.goo, which redirected to goo.ne.jp, its primary domain.

Joining .goo in self-termination is .wolterskluwer, one of those gTLDs that really makes me scratch my head for having never noticed its existence despite my daily exposure to vast amounts of gTLD data.

It’s owned by Wolters Kluwer, a large Dutch company that provides software for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unlike goo, the company appears to be in robust health but it never used its gTLD.

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.