.io sells $40 million of domains after massive uptick

.io is now a $40-million-a-year domain, after a few years of impressive growth, judging by the registry’s latest financial reports.

UK-based Internet Computer Bureau, a subsidiary of Identity Digital, recently reported turnover of £29.6 million ($39.6 million) for 2023, up 13.9% on the £26.1 million it reported in 2022.

While that’s respectable growth, it pales compared to 2022 (which I don’t think was reported at the time), when turnover was up a whopping 59%.

Identity Digital does not reveal .io’s registration numbers, but with turnover of over $39 million and retail renewal prices bottoming out at around $39 a year, it seems quite possible that the TLD’s domains under management has reached seven digits.

When Afilias paid $70 million for ICB in 2017, it had turnover of $7 million and domains were reported at 270,000.

ICB’s gross margins are terrible — one can only assume its registry services deal with Identity Digital is rather generous to its parent — at 4.4%, with £28 million being paid out as cost of sales.

With another £3 million of unelaborated “administrative expenses”, ICB reported a 2023 net loss of £404,000 compared to a 2022 profit of £1.7 million. It paid £17,660 in UK tax, down from £277,703. It had just $69,000 cash on hand at the end of the year.

While ICB also runs .ac (Ascension Island) and .sh (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha), it’s only .io that has seen broad uptake among the global domain-registering public. Tech firms like it because I/O means “input/output”.

.io is the ccTLD for the contested British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Archipelago, which is administered from the UK and used almost exclusively to house a strategically important US military base.

Former .co registry defeated in $350 million contract fix case

The Neustar spin-off that once operated the .co TLD reportedly has lost a case against the Colombian government in which it had sought $350 million in damages over the acrimonious renewal of its registry contract.

According to local reports, the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, part of the World Bank, last week ruled in favor of Colombia on both the merits and on jurisdictional grounds.

The case had been brought in late 2019 by Neustar, which at the time managed some 2.3 million .co domains, under government contract, via a Colombian subsidiary it acquired in 2014.

Neustar has since been acquired by GoDaddy, which continues to run .co, but the ICSID case was inherited by Vercara, the DNS security services arm of the company that GoDaddy didn’t buy.

As .CO Internet, Vercara was hired by Colombia to turn .co into a global alternative to .com with a much-hyped 2010 relaunch. It was very successful, but when it came time to renew the initial 10-year contract, Colombia instead put it out for rebid and started behaving very strangely.

You may recall from coverage here on DI and on The Register that the Colombian tender process seemed to have been specially constructed so that only Afilias, then Neustar’s fiercest rival and now part of Identity Digital, could win.

The government’s RFP had set technical thresholds, such as daily registry transactions, that Afilias could show it met but Neustar could not. It looked naive and arbitrary at best and dodgy at worst.

So Neustar took Colombia to arbitration with ICSID, saying (pdf) the government was in breach of the Trade Promotion Agreement between the US and Colombia.

Neustar ended up winning the contract anyway, albeit on terms that were massively more favorable to the government, and it sold its entire registry services business to GoDaddy days later.

Now, almost five years later, it seems Vercara has lost the case it inherited. While ICSID has not yet published its arbitration panel’s decision, local newspapers have got hold of a copy.

Colombia’s oldest newspaper, El Spectador, reports: “The court, in addition to stating that it does not have jurisdiction to hear Vercara’s claims, rejected all the claims on the merits.”

In unrelated news, Vercara’s recently announced acquisition by DigiCert closed yesterday.

Hackers break .mobi after Whois domain expires

It’s probably a bad idea to let a critical infrastructure domain expire, even if you don’t use it any more, as Identity Digital seems to be discovering this week.

White-hat hackers at WatchTowr today published research showing how they managed to undermine SSL security in the entire .mobi TLD, by registering an expired domain previously used as the registry’s Whois server.

Identity Digital, which now runs .mobi after a series of acquisitions, originally used whois.dotmobiregistry.net for its Whois server, but this later changed to whois.nic.mobi and the original domain expired last December.

WatchTowr spotted this, registered the name, and set up a Whois server there, which went on to receive 2.5 million queries from 135,000 systems in less than a week.

Sources of the queries included security tools such as VirusTotal and URLSCAN, which apparently hadn’t updated the hard-coded Whois URL list in their software, the researchers said.

GoDaddy and Domain.com were among the registrars whose Whois tools were sending queries to the outdated URL, WatchTowr found.

Incredibly, so was Name.com, which is owned by Identity Digital, the actual .mobi registry.

More worryingly, it seems some Certificate Authorities, responsible for issuing the digital certificates that make SSL work, were also using the old Whois address to verify domain ownership.

WatchTowr says it was possible to obtain a cert for microsoft.mobi by providing its own email address in a phony Whois record served up by its bogus Whois server.

“Effectively, we had inadvertently undermined the CA process for the entire .mobi TLD,” the researchers wrote.

They said they would have also been able to send malicious code payloads to vulnerable Whois clients.

While WatchTowr’s research doesn’t mention ICANN, it might be worth noting that the change from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi is very probably a result of .mobi’s transition to a standardized gTLD registry contract, which requires all registries to use the whois.nic.[TLD] format for their Whois servers.

As a pre-2012 gTLD, .mobi did not have this requirement until it signed a new Registry Agreement in 2017. There are still some legacy gTLDs, such as .post, that have not migrated to the new standard URL format.

The WatchTowr research, with a plentiful side order of cockiness, can be read in full here.

Unstoppable reveals gTLD bid doomed to fail

It’s finally happened. Somebody has announced an application for a new gTLD that will almost certainly fall foul of ICANN’s rules and be rejected.

The would-be applicant is Farmsent, a United Arab Emirates startup that is building a blockchain-based marketplace for farmers and buyers of farm produce, and its domains partner is Unstoppable Domains.

Unstoppable said last week that the two companies are launching .farms domains on Unstoppable’s alternative naming system, and that an ICANN application for a proper gTLD is in the works.

The company said it “will be collaborating with Farmsent to plan and strategize for the next ICANN gTLD application, further solidifying .farms in the wider domain ecosystem”.

The problem is that .farms will likely be banned under the rules set out in ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook for the next round, unless the current draft recommendations are completely rewritten or rejected.

ICANN is to be told to reject applications for the plural and singular variants of existing gTLDs in the next round, and .farms is of course the plural of .farm, which is one of the few hundred names in Identity Digital’s stable.

The draft recommendations would merely require for ICANN to be informed that an applied-for string is a single or plural variant of an existing gTLD in the same language and check in a dictionary to confirm that is indeed the case.

In the case of .farm and .farms, I doubt the dictionary verification would realistically even be needed — though I’d bet checking that box would be at least one billable hour for somebody — as it’s a pretty clear-cut case of a bannable clash.

The ICANN staff/community working group drafting the recommendations has spent a huge amount of time arguing about the language of the plurals rule. It’s a surprisingly tricky problem, especially when ICANN is terrified of being seen as a content regulator.

Pride fails to reverse gay domains decline

There are any number of ways gay people can express themselves during Pride, but buying gay-themed domain names doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Zone files show that the .gay gTLD lost over 700 domains in June, which is recognized in most Anglophone liberal democracies as Pride Month, to end the period with about 21,400 names.

Meanwhile, .lgbt lost about 80 domains over the same period, ending the month with about 3,700 domains in its zone.

The declines were not unique to June. Both gTLDs have been on the slide for a while, with .gay peaking at 29,761 domains last November and .lgbt peaking at about 3,930 in May 2023.

.gay is managed by GoDaddy, .lgbt by Identity Digital.

GlobalBlock blocking 2.5 million domains

GoDaddy-led brand protection project GlobalBlock says it is already blocking over 2.5 million domains, just a couple of weeks after its formal launch.

The GlobalBlock web site reports that 2,569,815 domains are currently being blocked across 559 extensions (a mix of ccTLDs, gTLDs, third-level domains and blockchain names), for an average of just under 4,600 per extension.

It’s difficult to extrapolate much useful information about rapid market demand for the service from this one number, for a variety of reasons.

First, the more-expensive GlobalBlock+ service can block well north of 10,000 domains, mostly homographic variants of a trademark, for a single fee, which could mean as few as just a couple hundred customers have signed up so far at the most pessimistic interpretation.

Second, GlobalBlock offered pricing incentives to existing customers of GoDaddy’s AdultBlock and Identity Digital’s Domain Protected Marks List, both of which are over a decade old, in the months-long run-up to launch.

The vanilla, single-brand GlobalBlock service retails for about $6,000 per year, with GlobalBlock+ going for closer to $9,000.

Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps

Namecheap has sued ICANN in California, asking a court to force the Org to revisit its decision to lift price caps on .org and .info domain names five years ago.

Registrar CEO Richard Kirkendall announced the suit on Twitter this afternoon:

Today we filed suit against @ICANN. After a previous ruling via a mediation process they have taken little action towards the recommendations of that ruling and so our hand has been forced to take this action. We feel that ICANN is in direct violation of their mandate and…

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) February 5, 2024

The lawsuit follows an Independent Review Process case that Namecheap partially won in December 2022, where the panel said ICANN should hire an economist to look at whether price caps are a good idea before revisiting its decision to scrap them.

The panel found that the ICANN board of directors had shirked its duties to make the decision itself and had failed to act as transparently as its bylaws mandate.

Namecheap says that over a year after that decision was delivered, ICANN has not implemented the IRP panel’s recommendations, so now it wants the Superior Court in Los Angeles to hand down an injunction forcing ICANN to do so.

Before 2019, .org was limited to 10% price increases every year, but the cap was lifted, along with caps in .info and .biz, when ICANN renewed, standardized and updated the respective registries’ Registry Agreements.

After the decision was made to scrap .org price caps, despite huge public outrage, Namecheap rounded up its lawyers almost immediately.

The caps decision led to the ulimtately unsuccessful attempt by Ethos Capital to acquire Public Interest Registry, which runs .org.

Namecheap’s new lawsuit wants the judge to issue “an order directing ICANN to comply with the recommendations of the IRP Panel”.

That means ICANN’s board would be told to consider approaching PIR and .info registry Identity Digital to talk about reintroducing price caps, to hire the economist, and to modify its procedures to avoid any future transparency missteps.

Airline gTLD crashes and burns

Another would-be dot-brand has added itself to the list of “On second thoughts…” gTLD registries, asking ICANN to tear up its contract.

Century-old Avianca, Colombia’s largest airline, filed its termination papers with ICANN in December and ICANN published them for comment last week.

While the original 2012 application clearly stated that .avianca was intended as a single-registrant dot-brand, Avianca never actually got around to applying for its Spec 13 exemptions so I won’t be technically counting it as a dead dot-brand.

Despite being operational since early 2016, the TLD never had any registrations beyond the mandatory nic.avianca registry placeholder.

The back-end registry services provider and original application consultant was Identity Digital (née Afilias).

INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital

Internet Naming Co has sold one of its gTLDs to Identity Digital, barely a year after taking it from UNR.

The Registry Agreement for .juegos — Spanish for “games” — was assigned to ID subsidiary Dog Beach in early December, according to ICANN records.

ID already runs the English-language .games, while XYZ runs the singular .game. There is no singular gTLD in the Spanish.

.juegos in volume terms has been a disappointment. Originally with UNR predecessor Uniregistry, it peaked at 2,353 domains under management in 2016, when names were priced at around $20 a year.

But the gTLD was affected by Uniregistry’s decision to massively increase prices to compensate for weak volume in 2017, which caused some of the leading registrars to drop the TLDs from their storefront.

To this day, GoDaddy still does not carry .juegos, but Tucows seems to have started selling it again, at an eye-watering $500 a year. Wholesale pricing is believed to be $300 a year. Namecheap sells it for $368 a year.

.juegos had 649 domains under management at the last count. The largest registrar in Entorno, which unsurprisingly based in Spain.

INCO took over .juegos, along with a bunch of other former Uniregistry gTLDs, in late 2022.

It will be interesting to see if ID reduces prices to match .games, which is believed to wholesale at $20 a year.

GoDaddy service to let you block domains in over 650 TLDs

GlobalBlock, a domain blocking service introduced to little fanfare by GoDaddy Registry and Identity Digital in June, is planning to launch next month with support from over 650 gTLDs and ccTLDs.

Built on the successes of GoDaddy’s AdultBlock and Identity Digital’s DPML, the new service was supposed to launch last week under the banner of the Brand Safety Alliance, but was delayed until January.

GlobalBlock enables trademark owners to pay one fee to block their marks across all participating TLDs, saving money on defensive registrations. Company names and celebrity names are also covered. A premium version, GlobalBlock+ also covers typos and IDN homographs.

It’s not just gTLD registries that have signed up. Nominet is participating, as is CoCCA. BSA is promising some pretty obscure ccTLDs will be part of the service.

In what appears to be a game-changing innovation, a feature of the service called Priority Autocatch seems set to stop cybersquatters and phishers from drop-catching domains that match strings protected by the block list.

Say you’re Facebook and you see some scumbag has registered facébook.ninja, if you’re subscribed to GlobalBlock+, the AutoCatch feature will see the domain removed from the available pool when it expires, rather than dropping so a second ne’er-do-well can register it.

GlobalBlock appears to be the reason no fewer than 35 registries covering over 300 gTLDs have recently asked ICANN for permission to launch a “Label Blocking Service” via the Registry Service Evaluation Process.

There’s money in blocking services. GoDaddy is making millions from AdultBlock. Some research I’ve been doing recently suggests some registries might be making more from blocks and defensive registrations than they are from regular domain sales.

For registries with small TLD portfolios, blocking services generally offer a poor value proposition. Services like DPML, which covers hundreds of TLDs, or AdultBlock, which covers all the porny ones, have been successful.

The BSA is offering brand owners a lot of carrots to get them to sign up early.

First, if you already have an AdultBlock or DPML subscription, your marks are already pre-validated. GoDaddy is also offering a 50% discount on AdultBlock until January 30; AdultBlock and DPML subscribers get 10% off GlobalBlock until April 30.

BSA says that pricing for GlobalBlock and the initial list of TLDs will be released in early January. Wholesale pricing will go up probably every six months as new TLDs are added, but customers will only pay the increased price upon renewal while benefiting from the added blocks.

General availability pricing begins February 15.