Namecheap loses attempt to bring back .org price caps

ICANN seems to have won a big victory in its ongoing tussle with Namecheap over price caps for .org and .info domains.

A California court ruled late last week that it cannot force ICANN into pricing talks with the registries for the two gTLDs, denying a motion that Namecheap filed back in April.

The dispute dates back to 2019, when ICANN removed price caps from Public Interest Registry’s .org registry contract, which had limited PIR to 10% annual increases.

Namecheap used ICANN’s own Independent Review Process accountability mechanism to challenge this decision and won, kinda, in 2022.

The IRP panel found ICANN had breached its bylaws and issued “recommendations” such as commissioning an economic report into price caps, deciding if price caps should return, and if so then talking to the registries about bringing them back.

When there’d been little action by early 2024, Namecheap sued to get the backing of the court for the IRP decision. It was successful, with the court ruling this February that the IRP findings were valid.

In the meantime, ICANN had obtained its economist’s report and passed a resolution stating that it should not bring price caps back to the two registry contracts.

But Namecheap had a final crack at getting the court to force ICANN into price cap. In a motion this April, it asked the court to instruct ICANN to “approach the registry operators for .ORG and .INFO to agree to some form of price control”.

The court didn’t buy its arguments, however, last week denying Namecheap’s requests on the grounds that ICANN had in fact considered the IRP panel’s recommendations:

Namecheap provides evidence that ICANN in fact did consider the Panel’s recommendations, and thus Plaintiff admits that ICANN did not reject any of the Panel’s findings, so as correctly stated by ICANN, “there is nothing for this Court to enforce.”

In the six years since the price caps were lifted, non-profit PIR has not raised .org prices, while for-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices every year, from $10.84 in 2019 to $19 today.

.io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty

The UK government has signed a treaty handing over sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius, which could eventually turn out to be bad news for .io domain name owners.

Currently known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, Chagos was seized in the 1960s and 1970s, its citizens deported, and is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.

The new treaty (pdf) is not of course interested in issues as small-beer as ownership of ccTLDs — it’s much more concerned with the control of spectrum critical to running the base — but there are some elements of the text that may be cause for concern.

• A name change now seems inevitable. With Mauritius now assuming full sovereignty of the whole archipelago, the name BIOT seems destined for the trash heap of history. The treaty does not refer to BIOT once.
• The treaty does explicitly grant Mauritius control over “regulation of commercial activities, including the provision of electronic communications services, unrelated to the operation of the Base”.
• The UK is to inform the United Nations that it no longer exercises sovereignty over Chagos and Mauritius will also gain full representation for Chagos at the International Telecommunications Union.

Who gets to talk to the UN on behalf of the islands is important because of how country names and the codes used for ccTLDs are assigned.

The Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat publishes a standard known as M49, “Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use”. That’s where ccTLD codes first appear.

That list is used by the International Organization for Standardization when it builds its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which is in turn used by ICANN/IANA to decide which territories qualify for a ccTLD and what the ccTLD is.

If Chagos is no longer recognised by the UN as a separate territory for statistical purposes, that would set a chain of events in motion that would see .io removed from the DNS root in five to 10 years.

If Chagos retains its place on the various lists, and Mauritius changes not only the name but the two-letter code, that would see .io retired and replaced with the ccTLD matching the new code, again in five to 10 years.

Or Mauritius could change the name, but not the code, meaning .io registrants would be safe. The ccTLD is believed to have over a million registrations and is popular with tech companies as a domain hack for I/O or input/output.

Identity Digital runs .io via a UK-based shell company it acquired several years ago. Perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, the company recently made a deal to become the back-end registry operator for .mu, the Mauritian ccTLD, so it has a foot in the door in the country.

.ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital.

The company took over management of Anguilla’s ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post.

The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Namecheap and went daily.

It’s also put .ai into its DropZone system, so domains that don’t sell at auction can be bid on by registrars through a centralized registry-managed process rather than dropping immediately,

Identity Digital also said that its regular registration revenue has increased 60% compared to last year.

Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD

Identity Digital appears to have taken over the back-end registry for Mauritian ccTLD .mu, potentially improving the company’s chances of future-proofing at-risk .io.

IANA records show that .mu has started using Identity Digital’s nameservers and Whois service. Registrars say the migration to ID’s EPP system happened last week.

Mauritius is poised to be given sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago, formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, from the UK, assuming the still-unpublished treaty is approved by both governments.

BIOT is assigned the popular .io ccTLD which may have more than a million registrations and makes Identity Digital, which acquired the UK-based registry operator a few years ago, about $40 million a year.

The change of control of Chagos, which would certainly come with a name change for the territory, puts the future of .io at risk, as I have been reporting for the last several months.

But with Identity Digital now in bed with the .mu ccTLD manager — a private company named Internet Direct that also goes by MU-NIC — it has a foot in the door for improving relations with the country, should .io come under threat in future.

I believe MU-NIC was previously using CoCCA’s software to manage .mu.

(Hat tip: DI reader “Tom”)

.ai channel doubles under new management

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company.

The company said over the weekend that its channel has doubled since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based on an archived list published by the old registry.

That’s a tiny chunk of the hundreds of registrars that already plug in to Identity Digital’s other TLDs — .org has about 2,150 registrars and .live has over 1,600, for examples — meaning there’s a lot more room for growth.

Identity Digital also said that .ai saw a 46% year-over-year increase in the number of new domain creates in January. A graph it published shows creates around 23,000 to 24,000 in the month.

We can’t work out what .ai’s domains under management is, because we don’t know what the renewal rate was or how many domains were deleted, but the previous administrator had said there was just shy of 600,000 names at the end of 2024.

It’s also emerged that Identity Digital might have inked a pretty sweet deal with Anguilla. According to a recent video from former manager Vince Cate, the company is taking 10% of the revenues from .ai’s sales

While that might not be a huge slice of the pie, it’s a pretty big pie — bog standard .ai names sell for $70 a year and auctioned expired names regularly sell for thousands.

A $7 per-domain payment is very high for a back-end registry services deal, where providers are believed to usually get a buck or two, but it seems Identity Digital might be providing more than just a dumb platform to .ai.

Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io

US president Donald Trump has indicated he is likely to back a UK-Mauritius treaty that puts the long-term future of .io domains into question.

Speaking to the media yesterday before a meeting with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he was “inclined” to support the deal, which would see sovereignty of the Chagos Islands transferred to Mauritius.

Chagos, officially the British Indian Ocean Territory, has the popular .io ccTLD, which is managed by a UK shell company belonging to Identity Digital.

The change of control would likely lead to a change of name, which could eventually lead to .io being retired, as I have previously written.

Trump’s opinion on the deal was seen as critical, as Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia, is currently home to a strategically important UK-US military base. The proposed treaty would see the UK lease Diego Garcia from Mauritius for at least 99 years.

UK ministers have recently indicated that the US had an effective veto on the treaty, but Trump said yesterday: “They’re talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, about 140 years actually. That’s a long time, and I think we’ll be inclined to go along with your country.”

While it’s not a definite yes, it perhaps shows the direction of travel, and it’s not great news for .io registrants. Any retirement of .io would take five to 10 years from the point the process starts, so there’s no need to panic just yet.

Identity Digital offers free domain trials through LinkedIn

Identity Digital says it is to offer its services via a partnership with LinkedIn.

The company said in a press release it will offer a three-month trial of the web site bundle offered by registrar subsidiary Name.com, to people who sign up for LinkedIn Premium, as one of the service’s “perks”.

The trial, which includes domain, hosting, and email, renews at $99 for the first year before reverting to the regular $289 annual price, the company said.

Other trial perks offered by LinkedIn Premium include a mindfulness app and Audible, which provides audiobooks and podcasts.

Another 40,000 .ai domains registered

Anguilla’s .ai grew by almost 40,000 domains in the last two months, according to the registry, as the ccTLD continues to benefit from the growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

Total registered domains was 572,575 domains on November 27, according to the registry web site. That’s up 39,507 from the 533,068 it reported on October 1. On December 20, 2023 the total was 353,928 domains.

.ai is in the process of a migration, which will see Identity Digital take over the functions of the registry. The TLD’s IANA record was recently updated to replace as technical contact the long-time manager Vince Cate with the Government of Anguilla.

Unlike other rapidly growing TLDs, which tend to sell cheap and rapidly fill up with junk, .ai still commands a mid-range price of $70 a year with a two-year minimum.

Namecheap scores win in .org price-cap lawsuit

Namecheap’s lawsuit over ICANN’s decision to lift price caps in .org and .info will be allowed to proceed, a California judge has ruled.

The Superior Court in Los Angeles recently threw out ICANN’s attempt to get the case dismissed, according to court documents released by ICANN. There will now be a hearing in January.

Namecheap’s lawsuit concerns ICANN’s decision in 2019 to lift price caps in Public Interest Registry’s .org contract and the .info contract then with Afilias (now Identity Digital).

Both registries had previously been limited to a 10% price increase every year.

The registrar filed an Independent Review Process case against ICANN, which is mostly won. In 2022, the IRP panel slammed ICANN for its secrecy and lack of adherence to its bylaws and issued seven recommended actions the Org could take to rectify its transgressions.

In the current lawsuit, filed this January, Namecheap claims that ICANN “largely ignored” most of these recommendations. It wants the court to force the Org to abide by the IRP ruling, which among other things calls for ICANN to look into reinstituting price caps.

But ICANN objected, saying Namecheap “is asking this Court to convert recommendations into requirements”, adding that it “does not have an obligation to act in accordance with the ‘recommendations’ of an IRP Panel”.

It demurred, asking the court to throw out Namecheap’s complaint, but the court declined to do so on legal grounds, meaning the claims will be heard on the merits.

In the five years since the .org and .info price caps were lifted, non-profit PIR has not raised .org prices once.

For-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices every year, by between 9.38% and 11.03%, raising the cost from $10.84 in 2019 to $17.50 today. The price will go up again by 8.57% to $19.00 in January.

Identity Digital to take over .ai

Identity Digital is to take over the running of .ai, following a deal with the Government of Anguilla announced today.

The two parties said they “plan to build a world-class registry management program that prioritizes quality domains and instills trust in .AI domain names for years to come”.

It looks like a back-end deal. There’s no suggestion of any kind of redelegation.

Currently, .ai is run by a small local outfit called DataHaven.Net, on a fairly basic web site that gives off all the vibes of being a one-man show and perhaps a little bit slapdash.

Identity Digital, by contrast, runs its huge portfolio of TLDs on the Amazon cloud and has pretty much blanket coverage of ICANN-accredited registrars. Only 40 registrars are listed on the current .ai registry site.

The ccTLD has grown to be a significant player in the last two years, growing from about 150,000 domains mid-2022, prior to generative AI entering the popular imagination, to 533,068 at the start of this month.

Identity Digital said that .ai already accounts for 20% of Anguilla’s revenue, and that this new deal should help increase that amount.