ICANN homes in on new gTLD application fee

ICANN has narrowed down the expected application fee for the next round of new gTLDs, and while it’s towards the lower end of previous guidelines, it’s still much higher than in 2012.

The bog-standard base application fee is now expected to be $220,000, according to a draft document circulated by ICANN.

That’s up on the $185,000 applicants paid in 2012, but it’s at the less-pricey end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range ICANN outlined at its meeting in Rwanda this June.

But the base fee is simply to get your foot in the door. It’s accompanied by an à la carte menu of additional services incurring additional fees, some of which were part of the base fee in 2012.

Because the new gTLD program is being run on a cost-recovery basis, the fee is set according to how many applications ICANN expects to receive, which is rather speculative and based largely on anecdotal evidence.

That predicted number is now 1,500, down on the 1,930 actual applications received in 2012.

The $220,000 fee is the lowest up-front fee that applicants would have to pay, and does not include extra payments they would have to make in the event of contention, additional evaluations or objections.

There are 10 different additional fees that could be incurred by applicants, including one that’s new to me — an “Occupancy fee” which the document says is “for lingering applications”.

I can’t help but think that this is an attempt to avoid a repeat of Nameshop, which applied for the banned string .idn in 2012 and continues to refuse to admit defeat, withdraw its application, and get its refund.

The new ICANN document notes that this proposed squatters’ rent is still open to discussion, but other fees, while not given a price tag yet, appear more likely to become a reality.

It seems dot-brand applicants will have to pay extra fees for their Spec9 and Spec13 exemptions, which allow them to work outside the usual registrar channel and allocate names only to themselves.

Applicants for community gTLDs and geographic strings would also pay extra fees.

There’s also the chance that the base fee could go up before the application window opens, depending on the outcome of some still-unconfirmed parts of the application process, such as the mechanism to address name collision risk. This alone could add thousands to each applicant’s bill.

The good news is that if the next round is significantly over-subscribed and ICANN makes back the $70 million it reckons the program cost, it plans to offer rebates to applicants dependent on how much extra cash it has received.

The draft document also includes estimates for the cost of the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which enables RSPs to get the ICANN seal of approval before pitching their services to new gTLD applicants.

Also priced on a cost-recovery basis, this program is still expected to cost a maximum of $92,000 per RSP, with the costs potentially falling if more than 50 RSPs apply to be accredited.

ICANN has a pretty good idea that the roughly 45 companies currently providing back-end registry services for gTLDs will probably use the RSP program. If a large number of startups or ccTLD registries want to get involved too, that would bring the price down.

Four more dot-brands switch back-ends

Four dot-brand gTLDs have recently changed their back-end providers, according to the latest records, three moving away from Verisign.

US insurance company American Family Insurance has moved its .americanfamily and .amfam from Verisign to GoDaddy, as has AARP, a US interest group representing retired people, with .aarp.

Aquarelle.com Group, a French flower delivery company, has meanwhile switched from French ccTLD operator Afnic to London-based CentralNic (which is still Team Internet’s registry brand).

The AmFam moves are notable because while Verisign has for some time been getting out of the dot-brand back-end business, most of its clients have been migrating to Identity Digital.

I count seven gTLDs making the Verisign-GoDaddy switch, compared to 60 going Verisign-Identity Digital over the last couple years. Verisign is now down to a few dozen dot-brands.

The Aquarelle.com move is notable because it’s rare for a dot-brand to use a back-end in a different time zone that predominantly uses a different language, but Team Internet does have a footprint in France and other Francophone countries so it’s perhaps not wholly weird.

Three of the dot-brands are not heavily used — .aarp has three resolving domains that redirect to aarp.org, while .amfam has about 10 names in its zone that do not publicly resolve and .americanfamily has none.

You might infer from the name “Aquarelle.com” that the company is not a big believer in the dot-brand concept, but you’d be surprisingly wrong — .aquarelle has more than 50 domains that resolve to web sites without redirecting to traditional TLDs.

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.

AI and games among July’s interesting dot-brand domains

A domain hosting a fun little video game for Lidl staff was the highlight dot-brand domain registration in July.

There were 210 registrations in dot-brands in July 2024, spread across 34 individual TLDs. As usual, the largest registrant was German financial services firm Deutsche Vermögensberatung, which gives .dvag domains to its agents, with 90 new regs.

Just like in the non-brand space, not all dot-brand regs immediately resolve publicly. Some never will. Others, technical indicators show, are only designed for private corporate purposes.

These are the new domains that caught my eye in July.

levelup.lidl (also level-up.lidl) — These domains leads to a surprisingly polished, cutesy-cutesy browser game where the player, presumably a new hire at the German supermarket giant, controls a cartoon potato (?) character as they wander around a 3D landscape interacting with other characters to learn about Lidl’s corporate values. Okay, I admit I only gave it five minutes, but it surely beats a PowerPoint.

gemini.google — Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot. The brand has been around since last December, but it took until July for the matching .google domain to be registered. It currently resolves to gemini.google.com, the official Gemini site. Google also registered another of its brands, fitbit.google, in the month, but it does not currently publicly resolve.

sustainability.bostik (and 27 others) — Adhesives maker Bostik registered 28 .bostik domains in July, all related to product categories (paper.bostik, tape.bostik), customer verticals (transportation.bostik, construction.bostik) or corporate purposes (history.bostik, careers.bostik). The company only has 36 active .bostik domains, registering none for over a year, so the new regs suggest a possible rethink of the dot-brand, even though the domains don’t yet publicly resolve.

escapegames.bnpparibas — Why would BNP Paribas, a large French bank, be interested in “escape games”? Is it planning on locking people in its massive safes? The domain doesn’t currently resolve, so I couldn’t tell you.

sellersinyourcommunity.amazon (and variants) — Amazon also registered the likes of sellersofthecommunity.amazon and sellersinthecommunity.amazon, but the registration of siyc.amazon suggests “Sellers In Your Community” is to be the correct brand for whatever localized e-commerce initiative the online retailer has in mind.

It’s official, .internal is blocked forever

ICANN has formally confirmed that the gTLD .internal will never be delegated.

Its board of directors resolved earlier this week that it “reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications.”

It went on to recommend “that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization’s technical outreach.”

The idea is to give organizations a gTLD that they can use behind their firewalls that they can be sure will never become a public-DNS gTLD in future, which would carry the risk of name collisions and data leakage.

The string “internal” was picked in January over .private and put out for public comment to murmurs of approval.

The move means nobody will be able to apply for .internal in future new gTLD application rounds.

Amazon to launch two new gTLDs this month

Amazon Registry is to finally launch two of the gTLDs it has been sitting on for the best part of a decade.

The company expects to take .deal and .now to sunrise later this month, with general availability following in September.

According to information provided by ICANN, sunrise for both runs for a month from August 22, followed immediately by a week-long Early Access Period and general availability at standard pricing September 30.

Both extensions have been in the root since 2016, parts of Amazon’s portfolio of 54 mostly unused gTLDs.

They’re the first English-language strings the company has launched since .bot, which came out with a controlled release in 2018 before loosening its restrictions last year. It has about 14,000 domains.

Similar TLDs to .deal and .now are already available from other registries, which may give clues to their potential.

The plural .deals is part of Identity Digital’s massive portfolio, selling at a $25 wholesale price, but it currently has fewer than 10,000 registrations, having peaked at 11,388 in May 2022.

.now might be the more attractive of the two. The disputed ccTLD for Niue, .nu, means “now” in Swedish and has about 220,000 domains under management.

Private auctions to be banned in next new gTLD round

ICANN plans to ban private auctions in the next new gTLD application round, chair Tripti Sinha has told governments.

The board of directors plans to accept the Governmental Advisory Committee’s recent advice to “prohibit the use of private auctions in resolving contention sets in the next round of New gTLDs”, Sinha told her GAC counterpart in a letter published this week.

This is a significant departure from the 2012 round, where many contention sets were resolved privately, with tens of millions of dollars changing hands. Simply applying for a gTLD, in order to lose an auction rather than actually running a registry, will quite possibly no longer be a business model.

What replaces private auctions is yet to be determined. ICANN plans to publish a paper and hold two community webinars in August to discuss alternatives, and reach a decision at its meeting in early September.

Sinha warned that if it cannot reach a conclusion by the September meeting, it might delay the publication of the Applicant Guidebook and thus the opening of the next application window.

It’s quite an aggressive deadline, given the complexity of the problem. ICANN is essentially trying to figure out a way to prevent unscrupulous actors from attempting to game the system for financial gain.

Ideas such as allowing good-faith joint ventures to be formed between competing applicants have been floated in recent months, but have faced scrutiny as they might permit side-deals to be inked that have the same effect as private auctions.

What seems certain is that “last resort” auctions — where ICANN gets all the money for its already $200 million war chest — will still be an option in the next round, which is current penciled in for the first half of 2026.

ICANN’s board plans to pass resolutions on the matter next Monday, so we should have a little more clarity by the start of August at the latest.

ICANN to earmark $10 million for new gTLD subsidies

ICANN is planning to give $5 million of its auctions war-chest to new gTLD applicants from less well-off nations and wants community feedback on the idea.

The Org is sitting on over $200 million raised by auctioning gTLDs from the 2012 application round, and thinks some of it could be well-spent on subsidizing applicants in the next round.

It wants to create a $10 million fund for the Applicant Support Program, half of which will come from the auction proceeds and half of which will be covered by the existing program budget.

ICANN says this will be enough to provide “meaningful support for up to 45 new gTLD applicants”.

The auction funds have previously been used to replenish ICANN’s reserve and to launch the new Grant Program, which is making $10 million available with year to worthy, on-topic projects.

Clearly, at that rate, the Grant Program may well never exhaust the auction fund, given the likelihood of future auctions and investment gains over the next couple of decades.

The Applicant Support Program will be open to non-profit or small business applicants in most of the world’s territories, as I previously blogged. In the 2012 round, three applicants applied but only one received the discount.

The request to divert some of the cash into the ASP is not subject to a regular public comment process. Rather, ICANN’s community groups have been asked to send their thoughts to the board directly before August 12.

Eight interesting recent dot-brand registrations

If somebody told me that this blog spends altogether too much time shitting on dot-brand gTLDs, I probably wouldn’t argue with them very long or hard before conceding they probably have a point.

So I thought it might be useful, in the interests of balance, to occasionally (perhaps monthly) highlight some of the more interesting dot-brand registrations I’ve spotted recently.

There’s usually plenty to choose from — 34 dot-brand registries registered a total of 135 domains in June, many of which already resolve to live web sites, and there have been over 25,000 registrations to date — so these picks are purely subjective.

lra.amazon

LRA could stand for a great many things, but one of those things is Labour Relations Agency, which raises an eyebrow given that Amazon is currently fighting its warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize in the UK. Right now, it doesn’t resolve for me.

showthemyourpride.itv

I’ve seen this one promoted on the actual television here in the UK! It’s a campaign by broadcaster ITV, fronted by comedian Alan Carr, to get people to make gay people’s lives a little easier by calling out homophobia and such. It was registered June 27, when Pride Month was pretty much over.

go.volvo

The domain only leads to a 404 right now, but it’s notable because it’s Volvo’s first registered .volvo domain and the name is suggestive of some kind of planned portal site or redirect function. Fifty other dot-brands already have go.brand domains registered. Car brands have had a mixed history in the dot-brand space — some have enthusiastically embraced the concept, others have cancelled their registry contracts. In the first category, both .bmw and .mini also received “go.” registrations in June.

listen.afl

.afl is for the Australian Football League, and this domain redirects to a directory of its podcasts on its main .com.au web site.

ca.pioneer

Providing national portals using two-letter country codes at the second level is a fairly popular dot-brand use case, with Germany’s .de the most popular if you exclude strings that are also English words (my, id, it, etc). You might expect ca.pioneer to lead you to a Canadian portal, but it actually takes you to… ahem… usa.pioneer.

admaker.jio

Indian telco JIO is using this domain for a service that makes advertisements, believe it or not. It has about 20 other .jio domains, like stream.jio and translate.jio, that lead, without redirects, to similar hosted apps.

gpt.lundbeck

Registered by the pharma giant back in May, this is the second registered “gpt” in a dot-brand after gpt.fox. Presumably standing for AI buzz-phrase Generative Pre-trained Transformer, I can’t tell you what either site does because they’re password protected. Lundbeck has over 270 .lundbeck domains, most of which resolve.

beam.google

Could this be the eventual brand for Google’s Project Starline videoconferencing technology, which was first announced back in 2021? It certainly seems possible, given that this April-registered domain leads, without a domain redirect, to the Starline web site.

Unstoppable announces another new gTLD bid

In the run-up to the 2012 new gTLD application round, we were hard-pressed to find a company willing to announce an application. This time around, announcements are coming out of the blockchain world at the rate of about one a week.

Unstoppable Domains has announced that it’s working with Raiinmaker Network to operate .raiin, first as a blockchain-only namespace and later as a new gTLD hopeful.

Raiinmaker says it developers a blockchain protocol that “utilizes decentralized AI and scalable Web3 powered infrastructure to transform the distribution of value tied to authentic identity, data and behavior.”

No, me neither.

Unstoppable said it “will be planning and strategizing with Raiinmaker Network for the next ICANN gTLD application to further solidify its place in the digital landscape.”

It’s the tenth potential application the company has publicly revealed.