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.

Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad

ICANN’s board of directors has an unusually bumper crop of non-trivial resolutions on its agenda for next week, including the fate of the .ly TLD, new anti-harassment rules, and killing off as many as 16 applications from the 2012 new gTLD application round.

Of the nine items on the agenda, published overnight, four stand out as noteworthy:

Termination Procedure for Remaining 2012 Round Applications that were not Successful

With ICANN spooling up to start accepting new gTLD applications in the second quarter next year, it appears to be ready to clear the decks of the last application round by killing off lingering applications.

While details of the proposed procedure are not yet available, it could apply to as many as 15 applications that are currently marked as “Will Not Proceed” or other failure states in ICANN’s application database.

Perhaps the most obviously affected application is Nameshop’s bid for .idn, which was rejected because the string matches a protected country-code for Indonesia. ICANN has been begging Nameshop to withdraw its application for many years, but the requests have fallen on deaf ears.

If ICANN’s search engine is to be believed, major companies such as Tata (.tata, blocked on geographic grounds) and L’Oréal (.salon, lost at last-resort auction to Identity Digital) still have failed, unwithdrawn applications.

Applications for contested, legally challenged, as-yet-undelegated gTLDs, including .web and .hotel, are also apparently still live in the system.

Transfer of the .LY (Libya) top-level domain to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics

Libya’s .ly ccTLD is notable because it’s somewhat popular as a domain hack for words that end in “ly”. It’s been delegated to Libyan state-owned General Post and Telecommunication Company for 20 years.

While the transition from GPTC to GACI, the government regulator, may just be a formality, there’s an added wrinkle that Libya, tormented by civil unrest since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, currently has two governments and GACI is reportedly aligned with just one of them.

Community Anti-Harassment Policy and Retirement of Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment

ICANN has been sitting on this one for longer than expected. The Org proposed revisions to its Community Anti-Harassment Policy a year ago and quickly putting them to public comment, but there’s been scant movement on the issue since January.

The proposed changes would further regulate personal and professional interactions between ICANN community members.

Some commenters complained that the changes do not go far enough, suggesting that situations where no offence was intended and none was taken should also be disciplinary infractions.

Others said that the changes would have a chilling effect and fail to sufficiently take into account cultural differences among ICANN’s global community.

The proposals came shortly after the latest in a series of sexual harassment lawsuits against the Org was revealed. That suit was settled after ICANN failed to get it thrown out of court.

Some relevant developments over the last eight months include the appointment of a new Ombuds and CEO, allegations (denied by ICANN) that it retaliated against friends of the latest harassment plaintiff by firing them, and ICANN’s capitulation to the Trump administration by easing itself away from public commitments to diversity, inclusion and equity.

.ai rival lines up gTLD bid

The increasingly popular .ai top-level domain looks like it could have its first full competitor before long.

An organization called 0G Foundation, which says it has made a “decentralized AI operating system”, has announced plans to apply to ICANN for the new gTLD .agi next year.

AGI stands for “artificial general intelligence”, considered by many to be the end goal of AI technology development, where software possesses intelligence equivalent to or better than a human.

0G made the announcement via Unstoppable Domains, its application partner.

The organization plans to make .agi names available on its own proprietary blockchain first, with a “limited-time pre-sale” before launch “in the coming months”.

Unstoppable is selling .agi “reservations”, with prices starting at $5 for gibberish and potentially valuable dictionary words carrying premium price tags.

Sixteen more orgs vie for cheap gTLDs, but…

Africa and Latin America are still under-represented in applications for ICANN’s new gTLD Applicant Support Program, according to the latest stats.

The program now has a whopping 76 organizations at some stage of the application process, which is 31 more than ICANN originally budgeted for. That’s up from 60 a month ago.

The program offers successful applicants a discount of 75% to 85% off the expected $227,000 application fee, among other perks such as access to pro bono service providers.

But the geographic breakdown shows that, as of the August 19 compilation date, only one more applicant hails from Africa and there’s only one more from Latin America and the Caribbean, compared to a month earlier.

Two influential ICANN advisory committees, including the governments, told ICANN earlier this month that they are “deeply concerned” that the ASP doesn’t seem to be reaching potential applicants in these two regions.

Hardly any applications have actually been submitted to be formally evaluated yet. There are 37 open applications that have yet to even submit the names of their organizations. Another 36 have done so, but not yet completed the application form.

I wonder if the top-line count may include a certain number of tire-kickers. The barriers to starting an application are pretty low, requiring just an account on the ICANN web site and a one-time password app on your phone.

Only three applications so far have been conditionally approved — one from Europe and two from Asia-Pacific — and three others from Asia-Pac have submitted their applications for review.

Of the 37 that have opened an application, the geographic region of 19 is still not known, so it’s possible the regional mix could change a lot as applications are actually submitted.

The program is open to charities and other non-profits, with participation from commercial entities limited to small businesses based in poorer regions.