US government opposes most new gTLDs

The US government has come out against most of the new gTLDs likely to be applied for in next year’s application round, saying they will contribute to the “global phishing problem”.

The eyebrow-raising revelation came during an intervention from Susan Chalmers, the country’s senior representative on the Governmental Advisory Committee, at the ICANN 83 meeting in Prague this afternoon.

Chalmers said the US is not opposed to the next round in general, but “has some reservations” that the expansion could make DNS abuse worse and that ICANN should “consider how to limit the expansion appropriately”.

Here are her remarks in full:

The United States has some reservations about the next round of new gTLDs. Specifically we have concerns that expanding the DNS too broadly can lead to more spam and DNS abuse for everyone on the internet. Our concerns are not for a next round in general to be clear. We see value in certain categories of applications such as for geo-TLDs and for internationalized domain names. In some cases it makes sense to add new strings to the DNS, but in light of the global phishing problem (which we will learn more about tomorrow) and similar concerns the United States is of the view that we should not expand the DNS too broadly. As the GAC did in 2013 we must consider how to limit the expansion appropriately to take into account public interest impacts.

The US, which has at least five civil servants attending the GAC meetings in Prague, was the only government to openly oppose new gTLDs during this afternoon’s session.

The position puts the US at odds with likely the majority of next-round new gTLD applicants, which could be a cause for concern.

While there will no doubt be some worthy geographic TLDs and IDNs applied for, if 2026 is anything like the 2012 round most applications will be commercial in nature, with as broad an appeal as possible.

Sadly, no doubt some applicants will be the kind of chancers who want to make their millions selling disposable domains for a buck apiece to spammers.

While Chalmers’ remarks may be somewhat surprising, the US position under Trump isn’t a million miles away from the Obama administration’s position in the run-up to the 2012 round.

Back then, the US tried successfully to strong-arm ICANN into giving the GAC more powers over which gTLDs could and could not enter the root. Those powers have been grandfathered in to the rules for next year’s round.

But the political landscape was different back then. ICANN was still a US government contractor, which irked other governments. Some nations wanted ICANN’s powers to be expatriated and given to a body like the International Telecommunications Union. The US was keen to keep the Org under its jurisdiction, and thought a beefed-up GAC was the way to do it.

It seems unlikely that the US could derail the next round entirely. Technically, it would have to win over the full GAC to produce a consensus against the expansion, but one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration so far has been its refusal to play nicely or respect multilateralism, so who knows what might happen.

The US could also use ICANN’s own rules to object to individual new gTLD applications it deems risky or unworthy.

A GAC consensus advice objection against an applications has historically been enough to kill it dead, but any nation can also choose to go it alone by issuing a so-called GAC Early Warning.

An Early Warning is a unilateral notice to an applicant that a government doesn’t like their application and may try to get it rejected or changed in some way. Applicants are free to ignore such warnings, but are encouraged to engage with the government in question to resolve their concerns.

Could Chalmers’ remarks today be the first early warning?

GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital

GoDaddy appears to have lost the last remnants of its Amazon back-end registry services deal.

IANA records show that GoDaddy was recently replaced by Identity Digital as the technical contact for all of the remaining 12 gTLDs it was serving.

The gTLDs in question are: .coupon, .song, .zero and the IDNs .ストア, .セール, .家電, .クラウド, .食品, .ファッション, .書籍, .ポイント and .通販, which are generic terms for things like “fashion” and “books”.

Five of the IDNs have actually launched and have been generally available for years, but they’re been phenomenally unsuccessful — the largest zone has just 146 domains in it. The remaining seven are dormant, unlaunched.

Amazon originally used GoDaddy (then Neustar) for all 54 of the gTLDs it successfully applied for back in the 2012 gTLD application round, but it switched all but 12 of them to Nominet back in 2019, where they remain today.

.med is a deeply weird gTLD, but it wants to be more normal

Medistry, the .med registry with a really strange business model, is looking to normalize its practices and start competing with the cluster of healthcare-related gTLDs already on the market.

The gTLD launched in 2016 and had almost 42,000 domains under management at the last count, which may sound like a pretty decent showing for a 2012-round niche registry (comparable to the likes of .beauty and .chat).

But there are a few caveats. For starters, only one non-registry .med domain has been indexed by Google, and it redirects to a .com web site.

Delve into the .med zone file, and you’ll discover that almost all of those 42,000 domains are 12 characters long and each comprises entirely numbers and hyphens. Doesn’t sound very sexy, does it?

Furthermore, delve into the Whois, and you’ll discover that all of those domains are registered via the registry’s in-house registrar, Name Share, to an entity affiliated with the registry itself.

A couple of years ago, having not sold more than a handful of .med domain names (I’ll get to the reasons for that in a moment), Medistry seems to have decided to reinvent .med as a directory for medicines.

In the US, all human medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration are given a National Drug Code, a 10-digit unique identifier that the manufacturers are required to print on the packaging.

So, the domain name 55150-250-50.med refers to a bupivacaine hydrochloride injection, a surgical anaesthetic made by Eugia US LLC. Almost all .med domains follow this three-part NDC structure.

The domains seem to have been registered in service of Trust.med, another entity affiliated with the registry, which says it offers supply chain management services to the US healthcare industry.

Why the DNS is the best place to store this NDC information isn’t clear to me. All the .med names I checked came back NXDOMAIN and were marked as pendingDelete in the Whois despite being months away from expiration.

So… Plan C? Sell .med domains to any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants one, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Medistry says that, as of now:

A registrant of a .med domain name can be an individual or organization. All available domain names in .med are approved for registration on a first come, first serve basis through .med accredited registrars. .med domain names can also be purchased in the domain name aftermarket.

That’s hell and gone from the mission outlined in Medistry’s 2012 new gTLD application and its current Registry Agreement with ICANN, both of which outline some of the harshest registration restrictions of any TLD.

Its current ICANN contract states, in the Public Interest Commitments:

The lone method of domain name allocation in the TLD will be by Request for Proposal (RFP) under guidelines, rules and criteria as set forth by the Advisory Board in its sole discretion.

RFP for domain name registration in the TLD will be reviewed for approval by the Advisory Board, in its sole discretion, independent of Registry Operator.

PICs are enforceable by ICANN Compliance under the rarely used PIC Dispute Resolution Process, should there be a view that a registry is violating the contract.

Could Medistry be heading into stormy waters with Compliance? The company does have form in that regard — it’s owned by the same people who run .jobs registry Employ Media.

Employ Media got into a protracted fight with ICANN in 2012 over a service called Universe.jobs, which saw it register 40,000 generic .jobs domains to a close partner in order to turn the gTLD into a structured taxonomical jobs board.

ICANN thought the service was a breach of the .jobs RA and the two parties ended up in arbitration. ICANN eventually let Universe.jobs go ahead but it fizzled out a few years later when Employ Media came to blows with its partner.

Is history repeating itself with .med’s sudden change of business model?

Medistry says that full general availability for .med names will begin on September 2, but it’s telling registrars (pdf) they can “Pre-Register any domain to guarantee registration beginning on September 2” by emailing them a list of names.

It’s also looking to on-board more registrars. As of the end of January, the only registrars to ever sell a .med domain were owned by the registry. It uses Nominet as its back-end.

.med would compete against the likes of .doctor, .surgery, .health and .clinic.

Lancaster bags up its dot-brand

A French leather goods company is trashing its lightly-used dot-brand gTLD.

Lancaster has told ICANN that it wants to terminate its Registry Agreement for .lancaster.

The company added half a dozen names to the gTLD in 2016 — things like bag.lancaster and fashion.lancaster — but they always just redirected to its primary web site at lancaster.com.

Lancaster used AFNIC as its back-end registry services provider.

The string “Lancaster” has many uses, from other brands to geographic locations, so it’s not impossible .lancaster might return in another guise in a future new gTLD application round.

Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications

Nova Registry, which runs .link, has announced it plans to apply for 200 new gTLDs when ICANN opens up the next application window about a year from now.

It’s the first time in this round a company has announced plans to build a huge TLD portfolio. It would cost around $45.4 million in application fees alone, if ICANN’s guide price of $227,000 stays true.

It would make Nova the second-largest applicant by gTLD count to date, dwarfed only by the over 300 Donuts applied for in 2012. It would be about twice as large as the 101 Google applied for last time.

In the 2026 round, only Unstoppable Domains has announced a large number of applications — more than 50 — but those are all with partners that would presumably eventually become the contracted registry.

It’s not entirely clear from today’s announcement whether Nova is financing this project, which it calls SuperNova200, alone, or whether it’s looking for business partners.

“We will apply for 200 new Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs),” the registry says. “A new breed of gTLDs to drive innovation, competition, and consumer choice while enhancing the utility of the DNS.”

Nova entered the market in 2022 when it acquired .link from UNR. It appears to be ultimately owned by domainer Yonatan Belousov and is managed by ICM Registry alum Vaughn Liley.

ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program

ICANN says it will use a combination of AI and crowdsourcing to translate new gTLD program materials on the cheap.

Org said in a blog post that when a community member trying to drum up interest in new gTLDs in their local community needs some official ICANN documents in an unsupported language, ICANN will prepare a translation on demand.

The first run will be done with AI machine translation, and the draft will be posted on a community wiki for review by volunteers who can read the relevant language before ICANN finalizes and publishes a final PDF.

ICANN seems ready to post drafts of documents such as FAQs and info sheets in languages such as Hindi, Italian and Portuguese after next week’s ICANN 82 public meeting.

Program documents are usually only available in the six official UN languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian — so this project should bring the new gTLD program to a much wider audience.

Using AI and volunteers should mean it costs almost nothing beyond the work hours ICANN staff put in to administer it.

ChatGPT tells me that there are 195 to 200 official national languages in the world and 3,500 to 4,000 written languages altogether, but I didn’t check whether those numbers are correct.

If the AI is wrong, let me know in the comments.

As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.

Second new gTLD contention set revealed

The first showdown between new gTLD application consultants D3 Global and Unstoppable Domains has emerged, with the announcement this week of a bid for a cartoons-themed gTLD by a D3 client.

D3 said in a press release it has partnered with outfits called Animecoin Foundation and Azuki to apply to ICANN for .anime, representing the Japanese art form, when the next application round opens a bit over a year from now.

Together, the two D3 partners provide a cryptocurrency designed to enable people to trade digital art NFTs, and the NFTs themselves.

But the expected .anime application is not the first to be publicly announced. Last June, Unstoppable said it’s planning to apply for .manga and .anime with a client called Kintsugi Global.

It’s the second likely contention set between publicly announced applicants. Freename.io and 3DNS have both separately announced bids for .chain, of course intended for blockchain-related usage.

The next application window is scheduled to open April 2026 or thereabouts. There are multiple ways contention sets can be resolved under the current rules, but the main one is expected to be an ICANN-managed auction.

ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist

An Independent Review Process panel has thrown out a case filed by a failed new gTLD applicant because the applicant was found to have not existed for almost seven years.

A Bahrain-based company called GCCIX had applied to run .gcc, for Gulf Cooperation Council, in 2012. Its bid was rejected by ICANN the following year on the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee because it had no affiliation with the actual GCC, a political grouping of nations in the Middle East.

GCCIX has been challenging the rejection ever since, filing an IRP against ICANN in 2021.

But it turns out GCCIX, which apparently had only one employee, has not legally existed in Bahrain since 2018, when it lost its corporate registration for reasons that still seem a mystery even to the IRP panelist.

This kinda scuppers the former company’s ability to do stuff like signing a contract to operate a top-level part of the internet’s infrastructure. Dismissing the case, the IRP panelist wrote:

The Tribunal determines that GCCIX’s status as company “deleted by law” precludes it from engaging in commercial activity under Bahrani law. Those commercial activities undoubtedly include entering into a Registry Agreement and providing the technical and other services required to operate a gTLD… GCCIX has not had the legal capacity to operate a gTLD since at least 2018 and has not revived its capacity despite having ample time to do so.

The question now is who has to pay for this debacle, which seems to involve somewhere between four and 12 years worth of legal fees and other costs. ICANN says it wants sanctions against GCCIX, too.

The panelist said that a decision on costs would have to be made by a full IRP panel, and it’s asked both parties to have a chat about whether they want one.

Another VW car dot-brand crashes out

Volkswagen’s patchy commitment to dot-brand gTLDs is in evidence again this week, as the company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .bentley.

Bentley is one of VW’s luxury car brands, based in the UK. It’s exercised its option to unilaterally terminate its gTLD registry agreement, with no explanation given.

The gTLD had a single resolving domain, which redirected to a .com.

It’s the first dot-brand to terminate this year, thought the notice seems to have been filed with ICANN in December.

VW’s attitude to its original portfolio of dot-brands has been all over the place.

Its .volkswagen, which one might expect to be the flagship, was terminated four years ago, along with its Chinese version, but .seat and .audi each have thousands of active registrations.