Government to put the squeeze on .me registry partners

In what looks like bad news for GoDaddy and Identity Digital, Montenegro appears to be the latest government to demand a bigger share of revenues from its national ccTLD.

While already formally delegated to the government, .me is currently managed by doMEn, a partnership between the two American companies and local firm ME-net, but Montenegro is planning to grab much greater state control over the ccTLD.

And it seems to want more money too, according to an official document published this week.

Machine-translated, the document states:

The “.me” domain management model provides stable revenues for the state, but at the same time generates significantly higher overall economic benefits for the private agent and its (predominantly foreign) owners, with a relatively limited state participation in the total profit (about 35–36% of total revenues and about a quarter of the profit through the domestic partner [ME-net]).

The document states that .me generated €114 million ($132.7 million) between its 2008 launch and 2025, but that the government only received €41 million ($47.7 million), about 35-36% of the total.

The government reckons its share should be at least 50%.

The document says that doMEn has made €47 million in net profit over the same period, an amount in excess of what the state, which gets 33% of regular reg revenue and 70% of premium sales, received.

doMEn’s revenue in 2025 was almost €10.1 million ($11.75 million), having grown consistently every year since 2008, according to the document.

The document floats three options for a future registry model, ranging from full state ownership to a joint ownership with its back-end providers. All three options would give the government ultimate control over the TLD.

The government also explores three options for how the registry should be managed in future, from bringing it fully in-house to the current model of outsourcing all technical functions to a third party.

It concludes that the current model is probably the least risky right now, but notes that it could be used as a stepping-stone to a “hybrid” model where a state-owned registry handles key functions such as the registry of domains while key functions such as DNS are outsourced to specialists.

So in the short-term it appears that Montenegro is sufficiently risk-averse that doMEn’s owners may not lose the .me deal any time soon — a 2023 RFP for a new operator has been cancelled, the government said.

But it does appear they’re looking at a different regulatory regime in future, one in which more than half of their revenues go to the state, rather than into their own coffers.

Identity Digital takes over 25-year-old TLD

Identity Digital’s recent acquisition spree has continued, with the company recently taking over as registry operator for a sponsored gTLD that made its debut in 2001.

The registry’s affiliate, Jolly Host, has taken over .aero from aerospace trade group SITA, the Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautique, according to ICANN records.

.aero was one of the original “test-bed” new gTLDs that prevailed in the 2000 application round.

It’s a little different to a normal gTLD acquisition — .aero is a sponsored gTLD designed to serve a specific community, and there are registration restrictions in place.

The main barrier to registration is the requirement to be a member of the industry and have a SITA Membership ID, obtainable from the registry web site, before you can go to a registrar to get your name.

As such, SITA is not washing its hands entirely of the TLD. It will continue as .aero’s “Sponsor”, responsible for setting policy, with Identity Digital now contractually designated as “Registry Operator”.

.aero is cheaper to run that your typical gTLD. The registry contract calls for annual payments to ICANN of just $5,000, rather than the standard $25,000, as long as it has fewer than 50,000 domains under management.

It currently has about 13,000 domains in its zone file and renewals retail starting at about $40 per year.

The fact that .aero is currently sponsored and restricted doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay that way. There’s plenty of precedent, from .xxx to .med, of sponsored registries casting off their roots to broaden their appeal.

It’s the sixth gTLD contract Jolly Host has taken over so far this year after, .safety, .dot, .jot, .circle and .onl.

Identity Digital acquires another dormant gTLD

Identity Digital has taken over another 2012-round new gTLD that never launched.

The ICANN contract for .safety recently changed hands, with original registry Safety Registry Services handing over the keys to Jolly Host, the same Identity Digital affiliate that has now picked up five gTLDs this year.

The seller is a subsidiary of W W Grainger, a large industrial supply company that has safety products among the wide range of gear it produces.

The company had intended to run .safety in a restricted fashion, perhaps via a controlled membership organization.

But that never happened. It didn’t register a single domain. Its commitment to and enthusiasm for the gTLD is perhaps exemplified by the fact that its registry web site has been headered “SAFETY REGISTERY SERVICES” (sic) for over a decade.

Jolly host this year has taken on three gTLDs from Amazon, and one from iRegistry, bringing its total portfolio of gTLDs to something in the region of eight trillion.

.music has competition as .mu repositions

Identity Digital and it.com Domains are to market the Mauritius ccTLD, .mu, as an open alternative to the .music gTLD.

According to it.com, the ccTLD will be marketed internationally as “Everyone’s Music Domain”, starting with outreach at the trademark-focused INTA Annual Meeting in London this week.

It’s a non-sunrise sunrise period, being called the Trademark Priority Period, though this seems to be a case of branding rather than the imposition of any strict rules — .mu has been around for decades and domains there are already available to buy.

It’s rather a headsup period, it seems, with trademark owners being marketed to before the general public. This period will run from May 15 to June 28, it.com said.

Policies and launch details are expected to be announced soon.

There is already a domain for music, of course — .music. It’s a latecomer from the 2012 application round. It launched in late 2024 and had fewer than 30,000 domains under management at the end of 2025, and fewer than 7,500 names in its zone file today.

The issue with .music is that it’s a “community” gTLD, conceived at a time when concerns about music piracy online were a lot more acute than they are today, and it has registrant eligibility restrictions.

While .music domains have standard shopping cart friction and can begin resolving immediately, registrants are asked to complete a post-reg identity verification process that looks like a bit of a faff. Presumably, .mu domains will be less restrictive.

Pricing for the repurposed .mu has yet to be announced, but it’s on sale today with retail renewal pricing appearing to start at about $75 a year. That’s in the same ball-park as .music.

While rebadging .mu as a domain for music may initially hit like another case of a ccTLD trying to shoehorn itself into a meaning it was not intended to have, the use case is not without precedent. The rock band Muse has long used muse.mu for its web site, for example.

The rebranding of .mu comes about a year after Identity Digital took over the back-end registry services for the ccTLD in partnership with the Government of Mauritius.

.io safe for now as Trump puts Chagos deal on ice

The uncertainty surrounding the future of .io domains is set to continue after the UK government froze its plans to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands due to lack of US support.

The UK has run out of time to pass legislation approving the treaty that would give Chagos to Mauritius in the current parliamentary session, which ends about a month from now.

It is reported that there are no plans to make a successor bill part of the King’s Speech — in which the government sets out its legislative agenda for the next session — on May 13.

The delay is believed to have come because the Trump administration, which has been blowing hot and cold on the issue since it came into power last year, has so far withheld its formal written consent.

That’s necessary for the treaty to pass because the largest of the Chagos archipelago, Diego Garcia, is home to a US-UK military base strategically important for American bombing raids in the Middle East.

Chagos, officially the British Indian Ocean Territory, owns the ccTLD .io, popular among tech startups. It’s managed by a UK-based Identity Digital subsidiary that makes over $40 million a year from registrations.

The UK’s decision to cede control of BIOT, following international human rights rulings, raised the spectre of .io ultimately being replaced or retired under ICANN’s rules governing ccTLDs.

While UK ministers have denied over the weekend that the Chagos deal is fully dead, its future seems to be dependent on Donald Trump, or his successor, changing the US position on the treaty.

Amazon sells three gTLDs to Identity Digital

Amazon appears to have offloaded three of its dormant gTLDs to Identity Digital, judging by ICANN records.

While no formal notices of registry contract reassignment have yet been posted, elsewhere ICANN shows the official registry for .circle, .got, and .jot is now Jolly Host LLC.

Jolly Host is a new Identity Digital affiliate that appeared last year and already took over the .onl gTLD contract from iRegistry a couple months ago.

.circle, .got and .jot are all greenfield namespaces. Unlaunched, they have no registered names beyond the mandatory nic.example domain. They are unencumbered by legacy dot-brand restrictions, which should make for smoother launches.

Amazon appears to have originally intended .circle to play somehow with its Circle brand of home parental control technology, but the 2012 applications for .got and .jot don’t give much of a description of its plans beyond boilerplate text.

The transfers are likely slightly bad news for Nominet, which is Amazon’s primary back-end registry services provider. Identity Digital runs its own back-end (appropriately, on Amazon’s AWS).

Namecheap abandons fight for .org price caps

Namecheap seems to have thrown in the towel in its long-running fight to get ICANN to cap the prices of .org and .info domain names.

The registrar terminated its Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN back in November, with the IRP panel formally closing the case December 16, according to documents ICANN published last week.

Namecheap said it “has decided to terminate these proceedings without prejudice”, meaning it would be free to re-file the IRP at a later date. The company and ICANN have agreed to pay their own costs.

It was the second Namecheap IRP related to ICANN’s decision to remove price caps from the .org and .info registry contracts when it renewed them in 2019, bringing the two gTLDs into line with almost all other registries.

Namecheap filed its first IRP in February 2020, and scored a stonking win in 2023, with the panel ruling that ICANN had breached its bylaws and behaved in an overly secretive manner when it approved the contract renewals.

But the panel offered up remedies that gave ICANN a lot of interpretative leeway and important did not mandate the reintroduction of price caps. The second, now-defunct IRP saw Namecheap trying to force ICANN to undo its price caps decision.

It also sued ICANN in Los Angeles two years ago for essentially the same purpose, but it lost the case last July.

Since the price caps were lifted, non-profit Public Interest Registry has not raised .org prices, while for-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices from $10.84 in 2019 to $19 today.

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.

DNS issue at Amazon takes out major apps and sites

Amazon’s AWS cloud platform has been suffering major outages for the last few hours, taking huge chunks of the internet with it, and DNS resolution is being blamed.

Affected products and services reportedly include Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Delta Air Lines, Duolingo, Signal, Reddit, Amazon’s own Ring doorbell cam service, as well as the UK tax authority and various UK banks.

Amazon first reported problems on its status page at 0711 UTC this morning. By 0901 UTC, the company had narrowed the problem down, saying it “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”

DynamoDB is a cloud-based database service Amazon offers on AWS. US-EAST-1 is an Amazon regional data center cluster.

Twenty minutes later, Amazon began to report “early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services”. Not long after, it said the recovery signs were “significant”.

At 1035 UTC Amazon said: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”

AWS underpins hundreds of top-level domains — notably, Identity Digital built its registry platform there — but there’s no word yet on any DNS or EPP issues from any registries.

.io sales almost double over three years

The .io ccTLD continues to be a cash cow, with sales up 6.70% in 2024, according to the registry’s latest financial filing.

The company also faced its largest-ever UK tax bill last year, at a time when the future of .io came under sharp focus due to the imminent dissolution of the British Indian Ocean Territory to which .io is assigned.

UK-based Internet Computer Bureau last month reported revenue for 2024 of £31.6 million ($42.4 million), up from £29.6 million ($39.7 million) in 2023. Revenue has grown 93% since 2021, mostly due to a spike in 2022.

While ICB, an Identity Digital subsidiary, also runs .ac and .sh, the vast majority of its business is certainly in .io, a popular ccTLD with tech start-ups.

The company is essentially a single-employee shell, structured to pass the vast majority of its revenue to US-based parent Identity Digital. Its gross margins are barely 4%, an implausibly low number for a .com-comparable, high-volume registry business.

ICB reported operating profit for 2024 of £1.6 million ($2.1 million), reversing a loss of £1.7 million in 2023. But its bottom line was bolstered by £2 million of unspecified investment income, leading to profit after tax of £2.8 million ($3.7 million).

The UK tax bill was almost three times as large as any previous year at £807,000 ($1 million) seemingly due to this investment income.

The future of .io is still ambiguous, after the UK and Mauritius signed a treaty to transfer sovereignty over BIOT, which is also known as the Chagos Archipelago. Implementation of the treaty is currently being enacted by both countries’ legislatures.

A UK diplomatic team recently met with Mauritius’ prime minister to discuss the transfer of power, and the discussions reportedly touched on the “domaine Internet”.

A Mauritian newspaper reported that the discussions covered “l’avenir du domaine Internet, qui représente un enjeu économique intéressant pour Maurice”, which could translate as “the future of the Internet domain — which represents an interesting economic opportunity for Mauritius”.

The industry trend at the moment is for the governments of countries with popular ccTLDs to put the squeeze on their registry operators, but neither the UK nor Mauritius has a direct governance or contractual relationship with .io.