Six more gTLDs shown the door, five may be auctioned

There are to be six fewer gTLDs on the internet, after ICANN terminated its registry contracts with two companies.

Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have been cancelled, after a lengthy compliance process, while Kerry Trading Co self-terminated .kerrylogistics.

Despite being contracted for a decade, none of AGIT’s TLDs had ever meaningfully launched. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of registrations.

The registry had stopped paying CoCCA, its back-end provider, bringing it into serious breach of its Registry Agreements. It had also failed to pay its ICANN fees.

According to ICANN correspondence, after it entered into mediation with AGIT last August it came up with a secret term sheet to give the company a way out, but it breached the terms of that deal too.

All five were terminated over the Christmas period, but they could return if ICANN decides to sell them off to the highest bidder.

ICANN told the company it “will conduct an assessment and make its determination whether to transition operation of the .nowruz gTLD to a successor registry operator.”

But they all look like poison chalices. They’re all related in some way to Iran, and could raise cultural or legal sensitivities.

.shia is related to the branch of Islam, .pars is related to the language and culture of Iran and .nowruz is the Persian new year holiday.

.tci, which I can easily imagine being picked up and repurposed by a discount-names portfolio registry, was supposed to be a dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran and همراه. is the brand of its mobile phone subsidiary, meaning something like “companion”.

Neither was technically a Spec 13 dot-brand, which is usually enough to for ICANN to rule out a redelegation.

But even if ICANN decides to sell off these five dead strings to another registry under the Registry Transition Process, there’s no guarantee that will ever actually happen.

Org decided to auction failed gTLD .wed almost five years ago and there’s been no movement on that ever since. Failed .desi is in a similar situation.

.kerrylogistics was a Spec 13, and will not be transitioned, after Hong Kong based delivery company Kerry unilaterally told ICANN it no longer wished to run the TLD.

Kerry has five remaining dot-brands, including .kerryhotels and .kerryproperties, that it does not use but does not seem to want to kill off just yet.

Registrar terminated after ignoring Whois transition

A registrar has lost its right to sell gTLD domains in part due to its failure to migrate from Whois to RDAP.

Spain-based Abansys & Hostytec has had its ICANN registrar contract terminated over a litany of alleged breaches dating back to 2023, and its meager collection of domains will now be given to another registrar.

ICANN said in its termination notice that the company had failed to implement the Registration Data Access Protocol, the successor to Whois that this week became the new industry standard for domain ownership lookups.

The registrar was also past due on its fees, hadn’t given ICANN evidence the was still in good standing, hadn’t had an employee attend compliance training and was not publishing masked contact addresses in Whois results, among other things.

While its accreditation dates back to the noughties, Abansys has never had more than 600 gTLD domains under management and it seems very unlikely that it was making enough money from those domains to cover the cost of compliance.

ICANN said the termination became effective January 26, but it still wants its past-due fees paid.

Separately, Compliance has also sent breach notices to four other registrars — US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology — that cite RDAP failures as an area of non-compliance but appear to be primarily based on non-payment of fees.

All four registrars appear to have got accredited between 2019 and 2021 and stopped paying their fees not long afterwards. None of them has sold a single gTLD domain, ever, and two of their web sites suggest the companies are no longer around.

They’ve all got until February 12 to magically rectify their compliance problems or face execution.

$10 million ICANN giveaway winners picked

ICANN has picked the beneficiaries of up to $10 million it plans to give away in the first year of its Grant Program.

The board of directors approved the final slate of applicants, which will now have to sign contracts with ICANN, at its retreat this weekend.

While the recipients will not be publicly named until March at the earliest, ICANN has previously said it expects to give an average of $200,000 to about 50 applicants.

The applications — there were 247 in this round — were all expected to be funding requests for projects that align with ICANN’s technical stability and internet governance missions.

The Grant Program is funded by the proceeds of auctions for contested new gTLDs, notably .web, up to a decade ago. The fiscal 2025 budget sees the fund start with $217 million in the bank.

The program is expected to cost $2 million to administer this year, with the cost covered by expected investment gains on the principle sum.

Whois officially died today

Domain registries and registrars are no longer obliged to offer Whois services as of today, the deadline ICANN set for formally sunsetting the protocol.

It’s been replaced by RDAP, the newer Registration Data Access Protocol, which offers a more structured way to deliver domain ownership information.

Under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement and Registrar Accreditation Agreement, January 28 marks the end of the RDAP “ramp up period” and the moment Whois becomes purely optional.

I expect many registrars will offer Whois and RDAP in parallel for a while, so ingrained in internet architecture is the older protocol. Likewise, the term “Whois” will likely be used colloquially to refer to RDAP for some time.

The data delivered by RDAP is not substantially different to that delivered by Whois, and those who access Whois via a web interface, such as ICANN’s lookup.icann.org, probably won’t notice any difference.

The main headaches will likely be experienced by those using custom software to access Whois over port 43, who may find they have to tweak their code to parse incoming RDAP responses instead.

Importantly, the switch to RDAP does not mean users will get data that was already redacted in Whois. Privacy laws such as GDPR apply equally to RDAP.

The only way to obtain private data is contacting the relevant registrar, directly or via ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service, and crossing your fingers.

Could ICANN approve an R-word gTLD?

ICANN could be faced with the headache of approving or rejecting a new gTLD containing a term broadly considered a slur for the first time.

Unstoppable Domains has revealed that it is working with a client on an application for .retardio, which is linked to a memecoin cryptocurrency of the same name.

Unstoppable says the domain “symbolizes pride and a blend of brilliance with eccentricity”.

But the application could come up against significant challenges if it goes ahead, due to the various reviews and objection procedures all applications face.

The word “retard”, originally a medical term for people with mental disabilities, over the years morphed into a fun playground insult but is now considered offensive enough that, unless you’re Elon Musk, it’s often referred to as the “R-word”.

(I’m only typing it out in full here for the benefit of people who are reading this in their second language, who otherwise might not know what I’m talking about.)

Since 2009, the Special Olympics has held an annual Spread the Word to End the Word awareness day, which seeks to reduce usage of the word, which it describes as a form of “bullying”.

The British comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, faced a barrage of criticism from her own community when she provacatively titled her 2023 documentary about online ableist bullying “Am I a R*tard?” (asterisk in original).

There can be little doubt that it’s an offensive term in most of the Anglophone world, but does that mean it cannot be included in a gTLD string?

The current draft of ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook says that applicants “should be mindful of limitations to free expression” and there are multiple avenues through which a .retardio application could be killed off.

The most obvious way would be via the Governmental Advisory Committee, which has broad powers to instruct ICANN to reject applications on public policy grounds.

The AGB says the GAC Advice objection is for applications that are “problematic” or “potentially violate national law or raise sensitivities”, but that’s a pretty wide net.

If a couple of governments decided to champion an objection to .retardio, it’s easy to imagine they’d be able to rustle up enough support to meet the “consensus” threshold for formal GAC Advice.

ICANN’s board of directors is able to reject such advice, but in the 2012 application round it pretty much did what it was told.

Another way .retardio could fail is through the Limited Public Interest Objection, which can be filed against strings that are “contrary to generally accepted legal norms of morality and public order that are recognized under principles of international law”, such as:

Incitement to or promotion of discrimination based upon race, color, gender, ethnicity, religion or national origin, or other similar types of discrimination that violate generally accepted legal norms recognized under principles of international law

Literally anybody can file a LPI Objection, and they presumably could use the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to tick the “principles of international law” box.

If successful, such objections force the applicant to withdraw.

The International Olympic Committee has never been shy about participating in ICANN, so if the affiliated Special Olympics, or the IOC, or indeed any disability rights advocacy groups, wanted to make a point by objecting to .retardio, the LPI Objection would be the way to do it.

ICANN eyes more price hikes as it predicts dismal year for industry

The domain industry may not be set to shrink, but it’s not set to grow either, according to predictions in ICANN’s newest draft budget, published this week.

The Org’s bean-counters have also confirmed that the recently announced fee increases for registries, registrars and registrants may become a “repeatable” occurence.

ICANN says its budget for fiscal 2026, which starts next July, sees funding and expenditure both at $142 million, down $3 million on its adopted 2025 budget.

It’s predicting a pretty flat domain industry for FY26, with no growth in transactions from legacy gTLDs (mainly .com) and 1% growth from new gTLDs. Legacy would stay at $83.1 million and new would grow to $12 million.

ICANN reckons it will lose 17 contracted gTLD registries by the end of FY26, going from 1,109 to 1,092. It reckons it will accredit just three new registrars over the same period.

The estimates are all mid-points. ICANN has also given high and low estimates that vary from transactions growing by 9% or shrinking by as much as 14%.

The financial predictions are also probably going to get revised, as they don’t include the impact of ICANN’s planned fee increases, which have not yet been given final approval.

The Org said in October that it plans to raise the per-transaction fee for registrars, which buyers usually added on at the check-out, from $0.18 to $0.20.

The registry transaction fee will go up from $0.25 to $0.258. Fixed fees for registries and registrars will also go up.

The draft budget calls the increases “equitable, contractually efficient, pragmatic, and repeatable”.

“Inflationary increases can continue at ICANN’s discretion as contemplated by the Base gTLD Registry Agreement,” suggesting they could become an annual inflation-linked event.

The budget us currently open for public comment.

Meet the six people battling to join ICANN’s board

Candidates from Verisign, Amazon, GoDaddy, Identity Digital, Tucows, and DotAsia have put themselves forward to become the domain name industry’s next pick for the ICANN board of directors.

The GNSO Contracted Parties House — registrars and registries — are currently holding an election to pick the next occupant of board seat 13, which will be vacated by term-limited incumbent Becky Burr next year.

These elections are usually pretty secretive — not even the names of the nominees are published — but this time around I am able to name all six candidates and five of them have kindly provided DI with their candidate statements, bringing candidates’ views to a public audience for the first time.

The candidates, in alphabetical order, are:

• James Bladel, VP of government and industry affairs at GoDaddy
• Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia
• Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon
• Keith Drazek, VP of policy and government relations at Verisign
• Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows
• Jonathan Robinson, director of Identity Digital subsidiary Internet Computer Bureau

While most of the candidates work for companies that operate as both registries and registrars, each only officially votes in one of the two CPH Stakeholder Groups, as indicated by “RySG” or “RrSG”, below.

Four of the candidates come from the North America region, while Chung is from the Asia-Pacific region and Robinson is European. Burr, who they would replace, is North American.

All of the candidates have been involved with ICANN for well over a decade, some since almost its foundation. Four are former or current chairs of the GNSO Council. One up until a few weeks ago served on the ICANN board for a single term in a different capacity.

Some of the candidates’ statements focus on issues at ICANN they would like to fix, improve, or build on, while others focus more on the candidate’s personal qualities and qualifications.

James Bladel, GoDaddy, RrSG

Bladel is an ICANN veteran with 20 years of experience on various policy-making working groups and committees, including a stint as chair of the GNSO Council. He’s also sat on the boards of the .uk and .me registries.

His candidate statement lists three shortcomings he sees in ICANN’s current trajectory that he believes he could help correct.

He says ICANN “faces a crisis of credibility” due to its failure “to make timely progress on key policy initiatives” and has “fallen into endless discussions and efforts to mitigate unknown risks”.

He gives the Next Round of new gTLDs and Whois policy as examples of where ICANN has moved too slowly to implement policies.

“ICANN must stop telling the world why its role is important and start showing clear examples of multistakeholder successes,” Bladel states, warning that governments will get involved if ICANN can not prove its worth.

He adds that while he does not believe blockchain-based naming systems are viable alternatives to the DNS, ICANN should be paying more attention to how they could be complementary and looking into why there appears to be demand for them.

Bladel provided his statement (pdf).

Edmon Chung, DotAsia, RySG

Chung is a 25-year ICANN vet and has just completed a three-year term on the board, as a Nominating Committee appointee, where he regularly fielded questions related to internationalized domain names, which is one of his specialties.

Chung said he would champion efforts such as Universal Acceptance Day and the new Applicant Support Program, both of which are intended to promote the newer TLDs, particularly those in non-Latin scripts.

As CEO of DotKids, he led the only new gTLD application in the 2012 application round to qualify for the ASP.

“I believe with another term on the board, I can contribute substance to shaping the discussions on [conflicts of interest], board agility and the business of TLDs,” Chung wrote.

Chung provided his statement (pdf).

Greg DiBiase, Amazon, RrSG

Current GNSO Council chair DiBiase claims credit for helping steer the community through its negotiations with the board over new gTLD policy recommendations, which if not exactly fractious have certainly been convoluted, over the last couple years.

He says he would focus on “improving communication” between board and CPH through informal channels with the contracted parties, building on Burr’s work.

He says he would attempt to plug gaps in processes, such as the uncertainty about the board’s power to change its mind on community recommendations it has already adopted.

The board’s attitude to risk is also a concern.

“Many in the ICANN Community view ICANN Org as extremely risk-averse and willing to reject community-made policy recommendations if they increase the probability of ICANN being sued,” DiBiase wrote.

“Whether true or not, I believe ICANN should focus on bigger-picture risks, like harm to credibility… and not just specific risks like lawsuits or IRPs,” he wrote.

DiBiase has headed Amazon Registrar’s legal team for eight years and previously worked in compliance for the Endurance group of registrars (now Newfold Digital).

He provided his statement (pdf).

Keith Drazek, Verisign, RySG

Drazek has been involved with ICANN for over 20 years, according to the bio published by current employer Verisign, the company for which he has been working since 2010. Prior to Verisign, he held a similar policy relations role at Neustar.

He has been GNSO Council chair, a member of the ccNSO Council representing North America, and chair of the RySG, among other roles in important policy working groups.

Drazek has not yet responded to my inquiries and I do not have his candidate statement. I will update this article should I receive it.

Reg Levy, Tucows, RrSG

Levy presents the fact that she is not following the typical path to the board — via, for example, sitting in the GNSO Council chair or on the Nominating Committee — as a strength.

She says she would be “a strong voice for the Community” on the board, which she said has shown a “worrying trend of the Board ignoring the Community and ignoring the role of the GNSO Council”.

Levy is the only candidate to take aim at ICANN’s finances in her statement, with criticisms of how its budget has ballooned beyond the scope of most non-profits over the last couple of decades, of its costly deals with long-incumbent vendors, and of its “shocking” and “disingenuous” executive compensation practices.

Levy says that she would probably be the youngest person on the current board, which could help with “ushering in a generational shift”. As the only female candidate, who would replace a female director, she notes that she’s the only chance of maintaining the current gender balance on the board.

Tucows published Levy’s statement (pdf) on its web site a couple weeks ago.

Jonathan Robinson, Identity Digital, RySG

Robinson’s statement focuses on his extensive industry experience, which dates back to when he founded the UK-based registrar NetBenefit back in 1997, and his long-time participation in the ICANN community.

His only current paid role in the industry is as the director of Internet Computer Bureau, the .io registry and Identity Digital subsidiary.

But Robinson’s key selling point appears to be that he would quit the ICB gig should he be elected, likely freeing him up to be able to engage in board discussions about new gTLD policy and other issues affecting the domain name industry.

ICANN directors are expected to recuse themselves from discussions on issues for which they have conflicts of interest. Burr does not currently recuse herself from such votes because, while she was originally elected while working for Neustar, she no longer has ties to the industry.

Robinson provided his statement (pdf).

*

The candidates have already faced at least one round of interrogation by their voters, including at a closed-door session at ICANN 81 last month.

I’m told the first round of voting takes place this Wednesday, December 18, with a second round likely given the number of candidates. The current timetable published on the GNSO web site appears to be out of date.

The winner of the election will take over from Burr at ICANN’s 2025 Annual General Meeting next October in Muscat.

New gTLD use cases not much use

ICANN has come in for periodic criticism over the last decade or so for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in public about its new gTLD program, but this time around it’s trying to do something about it.

New gTLD program participants have said that ICANN should have thrown more of its substantial resources into marketing the program, raising the profile of both the application period and the availability of new gTLDs when they go live.

But, under community guidance for the 2026 application window, Org started promoting the program earlier this year, with the publication of a “Next Round Champion’s Toolkit” web site containing ready-made marketing materials that consultants and gTLD service providers are free to use to reach out to their respective communities or sales prospects.

The latest component of this effort is a batch of 13 “use case” documents, each covering a specific gTLD from the 2012 round, compiled by ICANN, “each providing a compelling example of how different types of organizations use gTLDs”.

ICANN was wise to avoid calling them “case studies”. They’re pretty lightweight, with not [m]any particularly useful insights or actionable nuggets of advice. A cynic might summarize the 13 documents thus:

Hey, did you know .CEO/.SECURITY/.BANK exists? It really does! Here’s barely 500 words of elevator-pitch fluff from the registry’s PR folk, presented in the format of one of those glossy, double-sided, one-page inserts you find in a conference schwag bag and toss into your hotel room trash can unread when trying to reduce the weight of your carry-on.

Six out of the 13 use cases are generics run by XYZ Registry. Five are big-C “Community” gTLDs (including the geographic/linguistic niche offerings .gal, .lat and .bzh). Microsoft is the only dot-brand registry represented.

Notably, given how much emphasis ICANN has been putting on its goal to expand outreach efforts in under-served regions (op-eds and press releases have started popping up in places like India and Nigeria recently), there are no IDN gTLD use cases yet. And all the use cases are in English.

Still, I expect the use cases could be useful to Next Round “Champions” in some scenarios, certainly not as later-stage decision support but rather as part of an arsenal of foot-in-the-door introductory materials aimed at prospects utterly unaware that new gTLDs exist.

Defensive dot-brands are renewing, making ICANN millions

Companies that have not used their dot-brand gTLDs in a decade are nevertheless renewing their registry contracts with ICANN, leading to a situation where even ICANN seems to be benefiting directly from defensive registrations.

In just the last month or so, the registries behind .delta, .cipriani, .gallup, .icbc, .frontier, .alibaba, .taobao and others have renewed their Registry Agreements for a second 10-year term, despite having never registered a single second-level domain name.

Far more dormant dot-brands have renewed their contracts this year than have voluntarily terminated them.

According to my database, there are 116 dot-brand gTLDs today that have only ever registered their obligatory nic.[brand] domain and nothing else. That’s from a total of 369 dot-brands still live in the DNS.

Given that the absolute minimum a registry has to pay ICANN is its $25,000 annual registry fee — rising to $25,800 on January 1 — it looks like ICANN is making about $3 million per year, a couple of percent of its annual budget, from defensive dot-brands.

Registrar and back-end registry services partners are of course also making revenue from these unused brand gTLDs, but the terms of those contracts are typically not public.

There are any number of reasons why dormant dot-brands may renew their RAs. They may still be playing wait-and-see, they may be spooked by the looming 2026 application round, or they may just have an aggressive BLOCK EVERYTHING brand management strategy.

Antisemitic remarks cost registrar dearly

A domain registrar based in Jordan appears to have lost about a third of its gTLD domains under management after ICANN slammed it for its founder’s televised antisemitic comments.

Talal Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which goes by the name AGIP, saw a huge decline in DUM in February, a month after ICANN’s then-CEO described Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s remarks on Jordanian TV as “beyond offensive or objectionable”.

Abu-Ghazaleh had deployed some pretty clear-cut antisemitic tropes and seemed to try to justify the Holocaust in a news interview related to the war in Gaza, causing outrage from at least one Jewish ICANN community member.

After Costerton’s published chastisement, AGIP’s DUM fell from 1,371 to 930 over the space of a month. It was the first substantial decline on record, with its DUM having been on a fairly steady but slow upward trajectory.

In August, the last month for which we have records, its gTLD DUM had gone down to 695, about half its peak.

AGIP is a boutique intellectual property management registrar, likely with higher margins than your typical domain retailer. A decline of a few hundred domains could represent the loss of just a few customers.

The registrar still has its ICANN accreditation. It’s also still contracted with ICANN to run an instance of the L-root DNS root server in Amman, despite a call for it to lose that deal.

But, as Domain Name Wire noted on Friday, it’s no longer listed as providing UDRP services for ICANN. This change seems to have occurred in mid-September, judging by Archive.org records.