Refunds galore as gTLD losers finally bow out

There’s been a wave of withdrawals of new gTLD applications over the last couple of months after ICANN gave 15 companies their final notice that it was time to ask for a refund or lose their money forever.

But so far just seven unsuccessful applications from the 2012 round have been withdrawn, from the 19 that were eligible, according to my records.

Notably, all of the remaining applications for .mail, .corp and .home, strings that were banned on account of name collision risks, have been pulled. Google, Amazon and GMO Registry will all get partial refunds of their application fees.

Two applications for the fiercely contested .hotel have also been yanked, with Identity Digital and Radix getting their refunds. GRS Domains, Despegar and Fegistry still have not withdrawn, according to ICANN records.

ICANN had classed .hotel as a “already been delegated to other applicant” gTLD, which isn’t completely accurate. The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, however.

There are plenty of other applications from 2012 that have not been withdrawn, despite the fact that the gTLD in question is already live and freely available for registration.

L’Oreal, for example, is still clinging on to its bid for .salon, despite the fact that Identity Digital has been running it for years and has about 4,000 names in its zone.

Similarly, Planet Dot Eco, DotConnectAfrica and Commercial Connect do not appear to has asked for refunds for their respective bids for .eco, .africa and .shop, despite all three being live and run by successful rival applicants for years.

Asia Green IT System has not withdrawn its bids for .islam, .halal, and .persiangulf, which were banned following government objections. AGIT was essentially kicked out of the industry when its business with five other Middle-East themed gTLDs comprehensively failed.

The 2012 round’s most-stubborn applicant, Nameshop, still has a live bid for .idn. Indian conglomerate Tata has also not pulled its bid for .tata, which failed on geographic similarity grounds.

In a resolution passed last September, ICANN’s board decided to give all of its remaining 2012-round applicants 90 days notice that they could withdraw or lose their money. It’s not clear when that 90-day period began.

Salesforce to apply for a dot-brand

Salesforce has become the most significant company to date to announce it plans to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD.

Specifically, the company plans to apply for a dot-brand, according to a disclosure made by David Lawrence, software engineering architect at Salesforce and IETF liaison on ICANN’s board of directors.

The disclosure came when the board approved the new gTLD program’s latest Applicant Guidebook at the conclusion of the ICANN 84 public meeting in Dublin last month.

While the IETF liaison is a non-voting role, he nevertheless recused himself from the AGB discussion, saying: “I work for an employer to apply for a brand TLD.”

While there are dozens of companies and organizations with public plans for new gTLDs, most of them are little-known brands associated with the blockchain space.

By contrast, Salesforce is, according to Wikipedia, the 61st-largest company in the world, with a market cap of $238 billion.

Glitch redux: ICANN screws up new gTLD security again

No lessons learned from 2012? ICANN admitted this morning that a glitch in its Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program exposed the identities of more than a dozen companies to their rivals.

The Org fessed up that some companies looking to get pre-approved as RSPs were able to see “identifiable organizational information” belonging to another user when using ICANN’s technical testing system.

“A total of 14 of 26 organizations using RST OT&E were affected. All affected organizations have been notified,” ICANN said. “No personal data was exposed, with the exception of a single minor and limited instance.”

It doesn’t sound like any gTLD application intentions were revealed — that part of the program doesn’t open until next year.

There were probably not too many surprises among the leaks. The landscape of the RSP market is well understood.

The only exceptions that spring to mind would be ccTLD registries that have not yet revealed their plans for the gTLD space, and completely new market entrants that have not yet tipped their hand.

The glitch sounds remarkably familiar for ICANN watchers with long memories. A bug discovered in 2015 exposed much more data, and about applicants themselves, but it was only exploited by one person on a handful of occasions.

That “glitch” led to allegations of hacking and trade secret theft and a long-running Independent Review Process case that wasn’t resolved until October 2023.

ICANN said it has taken down its testing environment to fix the bug and has hired an outside consultant to kick the tires.

This delay means testing will be offline for around two weeks, coming back November 12 at the earliest, and the reveal date for the list of participating RSPs has been pushed back from December 9 to an unspecified future date we realistically have to assume will be in the new year.

It’s not expected to delay the April 2026 opening of the next application round.

Amazon delays book and fashion gTLDs

Two gTLD launches pencilled in for next month seem to have been delayed a year.

Amazon Registry has filed updated launch dates for two Japanese-language TLDs: .書籍 (.xn--rovu88b), meaning “book”, and .ファッション (.xn--bck1b9a5dre4c), meaning “fashion”.

Both had been previously scheduled to go to general availability in early November, but new dates published by ICANN have pushed both back to the same dates in 2026.

Both have already completed their mandatory sunrise periods, back in late 2016. If they do go GA next year, it will have been a full decade between trademark protection and free-for-all.

Amazon has been slowly releasing its long-dormant stockpile of gTLDs recently. Three — .you, .talk and .fast — went GA earlier this month. Three others — .free, .hot and .spot — launched in the first half of the year.

.mobi to get a new rival in .mobile

There’s a new registry player in town. Dish DBS is preparing to launch the .mobile gTLD, which has been dormant for almost a decade, according to notes on its web site.

The first phase of the launch — sunrise — has been pencilled in for 30 days from November 10. If ICANN’s been informed of the launch dates, it has not yet officially published them on its own web site.

The launch plan would see a limited registration period targeting mobile phone operators running until early February. That would be followed by a 12-day Early Access Period and a February 19 general availability launch.

The plan is to have .mobile a fully open unrestricted space positioned as a “modern, mobile-first domain extension designed for life in motion – perfect for creators, startups, professionals, and forward-thinking brands.”

I’m expecting this to be the first of several launches from Dish, which has been sitting on a portfolio of a dozen gTLDs — the others are .sling, .dish, .latino, .dot, .ott, .ollo, .blockbuster, .dtv, .dvr, .phone, and .data — from the 2012 round.

Dish seems to be deep in bed with Tucows, its back-end registry services partner, on the revitalized portfolio.

The launch of .mobile of course will be viewed in the context of .mobi almost two decades ago, which was hyped at a time of gTLD scarcity and heavily speculated.

Now under Identity Digital, .mobi peaked at over 1.2 million registered domains in 2013 but has been in a death spiral ever since as investors cut their losses. It now sits at around 265,000 domains.

The original plan for .mobi, which was applied for four years before the launch of the first iPhone, was to provide a namespace where phone users could be assured that a site would be compatible with their phones. It looks incredibly naive in hindsight.

Dish did not have the same idea for .mobile. It wanted .mobile as a single-registrant space where only itself and its affiliates could register names, but that plan was scuppered when ICANN retroactively banned such models.

Bye-bye .boomer! Blockchain players abandon new gTLD plans

A dozen organizations that were planning to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD next year have abandoned their ambitions.

Unstoppable Domains said recently that 12 partners offering blockchain-based alt-TLDs have confirmed they no longer expect to apply for a matching gTLD when the Next Round opens next year.

The affected blockchain extensions are: .bald, .basenji (formerly .benji), .bay, .boomer, .calicoin, .caw, .cgai, .donut, .mery, .mumu, .nibi and .pendle.

Because some buyers may have hoped to grab the matching DNS domain if and when the matching gTLD got delegated, Unstoppable said it will offer refunds to anyone who registered a name in any of these extensions.

It’s also added “Applying to ICANN 2026” and “Not applying to ICANN 2026” tags to search results on its storefront.

The refunds don’t apply to alt-TLDs that could never have applied to ICANN because the string breaks the rules in some way (for example being numeric or too short).

love.you sold in apparent five-figure deal

The domain name love.you has been sold by Amazon Registry for what was probably more than $30,000, during what so far has been a bit of a disappointing launch for the .you gTLD.

love.you is the only domain currently showing up in .you’s zone file that has a creation date after 1300 UTC on September 25, the moment Amazon opened its latest Early Access Periods.

It was registered about half an hour after the EAP opened last Thursday.

The first-day EAP application fee was $10,000. If love.you was listed as a top-tier premium domain, which seems likely, that would have added an extra $20,000 to the sale price, and that’s before registrar 101domain applied its retail markup.

It’s the only EAP registration in .you so far, judging by the zone. Amazon is currently also running EAPs for .talk and .fast, but zone files suggest it hasn’t made any sales in those gTLDs yet.

The three TLDs are having unusually long EAPs — 11 days versus the usual five — with wholesale prices ranging from $10,000 on day one to $100 on day 11, before premium fees are applied.

Full general availability at standard pricing will begin October 6, with prices likely to be about $20 to $30 a year.

Com Laude buys larger rival Markmonitor

Consolidation in the corporate registrar market continued this week, with Com Laude announcing that it is buying longstanding rival Markmonitor for an undisclosed sum.

Markmonitor is being spun out of Newfold Digital, which acquired it for $302.5 million three years ago, with Newfold saying it wanted to “simplify its portfolio” and focus on Network Solutions and Bluehost.

Both companies compete in the brand protection and corporate domain management space, managing domain portfolios and dot-brand gTLDs on behalf of high-value clients.

Markmonitor is the larger registrar by far in terms of gTLD domains under management, with over a million domains at the last count. Com Laude has about a quarter of that number on its accreditation.

Ben Crawford will remain CEO of Com Laude and Stu Homan will remain head of Markmonitor. The company will maintain its offices in Idaho, London, and Tokyo.

Just last week Com Laude said it was acquiring rival new gTLD consultant Fairwinds Partners. Expect to see Com Laude’s fingerprints on a lot of new gTLD applications next year.

Number of subsidized gTLD bidders far lower than thought

A huge number of organizations that started applying to ICANN for subsidized new gTLD applications have apparently pulled out of the program, judging by newly released stats.

As of September 19, 42 would-be applicants had joined the Applicant Support Program, with ICANN stats published yesterday revealing that 30 have been removed compared to last month’s stats because they are “deemed inactive, with 90 or more days of inactivity.”

Last month, there were over 70 reported applicants.

To date, only three have received provisional approval and of those only one has fully progressed through the system. Only one has formally withdrawn from the process.

ASP promises applicants — only non-profits and/or charities so far, though small businesses from the developing world can apply too — 75% to 85% off the expected $227,000 application fee when the next application opens in Q2 next year.

ICANN has faced some criticisms from governments at the lack of applicants so far from under-serviced regions such as South America.

Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end

Unstoppable Domains has applied to ICANN to become a back-end registry services provider, according to the company’s CEO.

Matt Gould told DI that the company is currently going through the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which pre-approves RSPs prior to next year’s next round of applications.

There are 27 companies with applications submitted to the program, according to ICANN’s latest stats, but Unstoppable is the first confirmed market newcomer.

The company is a recently accredited registrar, but is best-known for selling names on non-DNS blockchain naming systems.

Gould said Unstoppable plans to use its RSP accreditation for its own gTLD applications and those of its crypto-company clients. It doesn’t sound like it will be aggressively competing for customers in the traditional DNS space.

The accreditation is necessary because Unstoppable intends to vertically integrate, marrying traditional DNS with on-chain names in its gTLDs, so extra technical work is needed, Gould said.

Unstoppable is building its registry infrastructure using Google’s open-source Nomulus software, he said.