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.

The price of .bar was $100,000 to a school

Wondering how the new gTLD registry Punto 2012 managed to get government approval for .bar, even though it’s a protected geographic term in Montenegro under ICANN rules?
At least part of the deal seems to involve a 10-year, $100,000 commitment to fund a school in the tiny Montenegrin city of Bar, judging by a press release today.
The registry will pay $10,000 a year to the school for the duration of its 10-year registry agreement.
It’s a stroke of good fortune for the city. Whilst not a capital city, it’s also a ISO-designated administrative region of the country and therefore protected by the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
Punto 2012 intends to reserve a few names for the city, and said it hopes residents will use .bar — intended to represent drinking establishments — as a city TLD also.
With a little over 17,000 inhabitants, Bar is likely going to be have one of the smaller city TLDs, and I expect most registrations will in fact come from bars elsewhere in the world.
In related news, as of last Friday there’s only one new gTLD application of the original 1,930 still under ICANN evaluation and it’s .tata, the dot-brand for a massive Indian conglomerate that is also the name of a province in Morocco. Coincidence? Probably not.

Ten more new gTLDs get ICANN contracts

.bar, .pub, .fish, .actor, .caravan, .saarland, .yokohama, .ren, .eus and .рус all have new gTLD contracts with ICANN as of yesterday.
It’s an eclectic batch of TLDs. Unusually, only one belongs to Donuts.
Of note is .caravan, which on the face of it looks like an English-language generic, but which is actually a closed, single-registrant dot-brand.
While “caravan” is an English dictionary word in the UK and Australasia, in the US it’s a 50-year-old trademark belonging to Illinois-based applicant Caravan International.
The Governmental Advisory Committee never flagged up .caravan as a “closed generic” in its Beijing Communique, so ICANN never questioned how it would be used.
However, the application states that the company plans “to reserve all names within the TLD to itself”.
What we seem to have here is a case of a dictionary word in one part of the world being captured by a single-registrant applicant due to a trademark elsewhere.
Another notable new Registry Agreement signatory is Punto 2012, which has obtained a contract for .bar.
The gTLD was originally contested, but Demand Media’s United TLD withdrew following an RFP held by the government of Montenegro, which had an effective veto over the string “Bar” due to a match with the protected name of one of its administrative regions.
I gather Montenegro will be paid in some way from the .bar registry pot.
There are also a few new geographic/cultural registries this week: .eus for the Basque people of Spain, .yokohama for a Japanese city, .saarland for a German state and the Cyrillic IDN .рус for a subset of the Russian people.
The only .brand is .ren, for the Chinese social network Renren.
The remainder are English-language generics.