“Time to lawyer up…” Anger grows over Verisign’s .name bloodbath

When Verisign said it wanted to unilaterally delete 22,000 .name domains from its registry, it assured ICANN that most of them were not in use and seizing them would not cause any security concerns.

But “most” is not “all”, and the chorus of voices demanding a U-turn and essentially accusing the company of trying to steal their domains to auction off to the highest bidder is growing, with one registrant openly mulling legal action.

ICANN has received two more Requests for Reconsideration, bringing the total to four, representing about a dozen more registrants of third-level .name domains that take the format firstname.lastname.name.

Most of the registrants have owned their domains for over two decades and are horrified to learn — registrars seemingly started notifying them around August 28 — that they were to be seized.

Software developer Neil Fraser told ICANN he was representing himself and nine others who would be “threatened with the risk of comprehensive identity theft” if Verisign is allowed to delete and resell their names.

The legacy unique structure of .name, when it launched 25 years ago, was that a customer could acquire firstname.lastname.name — the registry would take ownership of lastname.name, and the registrant would own the third-level domain only.

Verisign’s plan, which has been approved by ICANN, is to delete these 22,000 domains and make the second-level available via some unspecified mechanism at a later date, perhaps as early as next February.

Fraser says that the new registrant could set up an email address matching the one he has been using for 25 years.

“They would have access to banking, government, taxes, and other services,” he wrote. “There is no way to enumerate all the accounts that have been opened using this email address over the past quarter century.”

“I’m just one of 22,000 people who will lose their domains. This is going to be fun. Time to lawyer up…” Fraser wrote on his web site.

Another affected registrant, lawyer Troy Rollo, said in his RfR that he’s been trying to update the email address associated with his online accounts registered since 2002 and found it nigh-on impossible.

Verisign, for its part, says that it wants to standardize the .name registry around the industry-standard two-level gTLD naming structure, to simplify things technically for itself and the registrars that actually sell the names.

Both new RfRs, along with two others filed over the last couple of months, are asking for ICANN to reverse its decision to allow Verisign to delete these names and emails, or at the very least grandfather existing registrants.

ICANN and its independent Ombuds have so far shown little inclination to do so, and RfRs are almost uniformly unsuccessful historically, but the final decision will at some point soon have to be made by the full board of directors.

stupid.domain.name owner fights Verisign turn-off

The registrant of the domain name stupid.domain.name has become the second person to formally complain to ICANN about Verisign’s plan to delete his domain.

Patrik Fältström has filed a Request for Reconsideration, asking ICANN to reverse its decision to allow Verisign to shut down several services associated with its .name gTLD.

As I first reported back in May, Verisign wants to simplify .name by retiring its legacy three-level structure. This would mean about 22,000 domains and email addresses, many of which have been registered for decades, will be unceremoniously deleted.

Verisign asked ICANN for permission to do this via a Registry Services Evaluation Request, which ICANN approved in July. Verisign said that hardly any of the third-level domains are still in use.

But Fältström says he registered stupid.domain.name in August 2001 and still uses it today. His RfR says:

If the approved change is implemented, my registration will be terminated even if I want to continue renewing it. I cannot move stupid.domain.name to another registry operator, and I cannot solve the problem by changing registrar. The domain name will simply no longer be registered to me.

That is different from Verisign deciding not to accept new third-level registrations. I have no objection to Verisign stopping new registrations. I do object to the termination of domain names that are already registered and in use.

He’s the second affected registrant to file an RfR since Verisign’s RSEP was approved. Doytchin Spiridonov of Bulgarian registrar Dom.bg filed one in July, saying he would lose three .name domains that he still uses.

But it looks set to be rejected on procedural grounds, following reports from the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee and the ICANN Ombuds, both of which confirmed that ICANN was well aware that 22,000 domains would be deleted but allowed Verisign to go ahead anyway.

The Ombuds noted, in essence, that this might be a pretty crappy customer service experience but it does not rise to the level of a significant security and stability or competition issue.

The full board of directors has yet to rubber-stamp BAMC’s ruling. It seems likely Fältström’s RfR will be addressed simultaneously.

And Fältström is not just some rando with a grievance. He’s head of security at Swedish registry back-end Netnod and he’s been deeply involved in the technical side of ICANN’s community since the very beginning, including a stint as chair of the influential Security and Stability Advisory Committee. He’s a member of the Internet Society’s Hall of Fame.

So when he points out in his RfR that, yes, unilaterally turning off somebody’s 25-year-old domain and potentially reselling it to somebody else does cause security concerns, he’s not just grasping at straws.

.net prices going up

Verisign is exercising its option to raise the price of a .net domain, capped by contract with ICANN by 10%, starting about six months from now.

The company told the markets yesterday:

On August 27, 2026, VeriSign, Inc. announced an increase to the registry-level wholesale price for new and renewal .net domain names from $10.91 to $12.00, effective March 1, 2027, per its agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

It will be the first .net price increase to go into effect since February 2024.

Under its registry agreement with ICANN, Verisign is allowed to raise its wholesale fee by 10% per year, most of which is high-margin profit.

.net has about 12.4 million domains in its zone file, and the number doesn’t tend to fluctuate much despite regular price increases.

Domain name universe tops 400 million

The number of registered domain names topped 400 million for the first time, according to the estimates in Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief quarterly report.

There were 401.6 million domains across all TLDs at the end of June, up 9.1 million or 2.3% compared to the first quarter and 29.9 million, or 8.1%, compared to a year earlier, the company reported.

About a third of the net new names were registered in .com and .net (let’s be frank, mostly .com), leaving Verisign’s flagships with a combined total of 179.1 million names. Annually, .com/.net was up 8.9 million names.

ccTLD domains were up 2.3 million at 148.6 million, while legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs, such as .biz and .info, were up by a total of 400,000 names to 21 million.

Post-2012 gTLDs slightly outperformed .com, with 3.3 new names to end Q2 at 52.9 million. The larger of them, including .xyz, .top, .site, .online and .vip, all experienced six-figure growth, with .vip pushing .site out of the top 10.

The top 10 largest ccTLDs all experienced growth and there was no change in their rankings.

That said, I don’t fully understand the source of some of Verisign’s numbers. For example, for not the first time the DNIB reports Russia’s .ru at 6.9 million domains, which is about 800,000 more than the .ru registry self-reports.

That’s the difference between .ru being the clear number-four ccTLD and it being pretty much tied with the Netherlands’ .nl. Both ccTLDs self-report 6.1 million names, rounded, on their own web sites.

Verisign’s crystal ball sees more growth for .com

Verisign has cranked up its growth predictions for .com for another consecutive quarter, partly driven by the availability of AI website creation tools.

Announcing its second-quarter financial results last week, the company said that it now expects its domain name count in .com and .net — in practice that usually means .com — to be between 5.2% and 6% for 2026.

That a sharp increase from the 3.1% and 4.3% range it had predicted just three months ago, and more than double the low-end growth in estimate in its February 1.5% to 3.5% forecast.

In Q2, it reported a “record” of 12.7 million new registrations, bringing the .com/.net total to 179.1 million. That compared to 11.5 million in Q1 and 10.4 million in Q2 last year. The net quarterly increase was 3.05 million.

Verisign described its now-confirmed 76.3% renewal rate for the first quarter as the highest it has seen in 20 years.

Explaining the growth, CEO Jim Bidzos said: “Registrars are focused on customer acquisition and are successfully engaged with our marketing programs. Additionally, AI tools are making content and website creation faster and easier.”

The company’s domain base had stagnated for a period whilst major registrars focused more on squeezing higher average revenue per customer rather than growth in domain volume.

Verisign reported net income of $217 million for the second quarter, up from $207 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 6% at $435 million. A cash-printing machine, the company returned hundreds of millions of dollars back to its shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

.web could be a huge payday for Verisign

.web entered the root zone this week, ending over a quarter-century of drama over the once-coveted gTLD, and now it looks like it could be immediately worth tens of millions to its new registry.

Verisign got it, of course, seemingly by paying off the company, Altanovo Domains, that has been doggedly pursuing it through ICANN’s quasi-judicial complaints procedures for the last decade.

The company said in a statement: “The delegation of .web follows the successful resolution of all previous disputes related to the generic top-level domain (gTLD), the details of which are confidential.”

Now it seems Verisign is going to use its newfound freedom — the .web registry is not subject to the same feature and pricing controls as .com — to milk it for all it’s worth.

The company told analysts last night that it’s going to launch .web later this year with its mandatory sunrise period for trademark holders, followed by a Limited Registration Period for existing .com registrants.

CEO Jim Bidzos said: “We intend to run an LRP, and the rules that we will use is we will give all of our holders of .com registrations, the opportunity to come and get the same registration in .web before we open registrations for general availability.”

That could be incredibly lucrative. If, say, Verisign charges about $15 per domain per year, and about 1% of .com domains have their matching .web names registered, you’re looking at about $25 million a year of high-margin revenue added to the top line immediately.

I’m plucking those numbers out of thin air, of course. Verisign has not revealed its pricing for .web, and there’s no way of telling how for sure many .com owners will want to defensively register .web equivalents for, as Bidzos put it, “a companion website”.

The fact that .net has been stagnant for over a decade may prove informative — registrants’ mindset of “must get the matching .net and .org”, which was prevalent in the pre-2012 world, is not standard when hundreds of other gTLDs are available.

Verisign also revealed that some .web domains will carry premium prices, which could also prove to be a windfall, particularly if the premium fees carry over into renewal pricing, which the company is now able to do.

Verisign obtained the rights to .web in 2016 when it secretly bankrolled a company called Nu Dot Co, which had applied for the gTLD, in an ICANN-managed auction that saw a $135 million winning bid.

The clandestine nature of the proxy bidding was a huge source of controversy, and the runner-up bidder, Altanovo (then part of Afilias, spun out as an indie after Identity Digital acquired it) started filing ICANN complaints not long after.

While published ICANN documentation does not yet reflect it, it looks like Altanovo has yanked its Independent Review Process complaint against Verisign, with Verisign’s statement strongly suggest it was paid to do so.

I suspect Verisign was eager to bring .web to market to get some form of mind-share advantage before the gTLDs currently being applied for in the 2026 round start to come to market in a couple years. For Altanovo, patience may have meant profit.

Many in the industry, myself included, assumed a decade ago that Verisign’s primary goal in obtaining .web was defensive — it wanted to keep what it saw as .com’s strongest competitor out of the hands of its rivals and would probably just leave it dormant.

That may or may not have been true at the time, but based on current evidence it looks like that’s no longer the plan, if it ever was. Verisign’s talking about a launch before the end of the year.

Verisign will kill off 37 Kevins (and 22,000 others), complaint claims

Verisign’s plans to shut down a bunch of legacy services in the .name gTLD has been challenged by a registrant who believes he will lose his domains and email addresses if the registry goes ahead.

Doytchin Spiridonov, who works for Bulgarian registrar Dom.bg, has filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, asking it to reverse its approval of Verisign’s Registry Service Evaluation Process requests that would enable it to turn off services that have been running for over 20 years.

As I reported in May, Verisign wants to stop selling third-level domains and related email services in .name, bringing the zone into line with virtually ever other gTLD, and delete existing names and emails in the process.

Spiridonov, who owns at least three third-level names, did the legwork on the .name zone file and discovered 22,288 domains would be affected. That includes 37 of my fellow Kevins!

His RfR (pdf) makes the case that ICANN’s approval of Verisign’s request was pretty opaque, involving private meetings between company and Org over several months.

“The approvals may adversely affect my ability to continue holding these registrations, may require migration to alternative services, may result in financial loss associated with prepaid registration periods, and may cause operational disruption and loss of continuity of internet identity associated with the affected registrations,” he wrote.

He further claims that Verisign misrepresented the impact of the changes in its RSEP, in which it stated that “There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names”.

Spiridonov says that the deletion of 22,000 domains makes this claim plainly untrue.

His RfR will be handled by ICANN’s board of directors.

Verisign to delete .name 3LDs and email addresses

If you needed more evidence of how innovation-resistant the domain name industry can be, Verisign is killing off two non-standard services that have been running for a quarter-century.

The registry plans to discontinue sales of third-level domains in the .name gTLD, along with an email forwarding service that offered punters personalized email addresses.

.name is a gTLD approved by ICANN in its first round, in 2000. It went live in 2001 with a novel but arguably confusing registration flow — registrants were only able to acquire third-level domains.

If you wanted to register kevin.murphy.name, the registry (originally Global Name Registry, since acquired by Verisign) would register murphy.name to itself first and control the DNS of the second-level domain.

This has led to the unusual situation where, for example, andrew.hedges.name and david.hedges.name are registered to two different guys, using two different registrars, years apart. Neither David nor Andrew Hedges owns hedges.name.

According to a Registry Services Evaluation Process request approved by ICANN recently, Verisign will not only stop selling third-level domains, but it will also delete existing registrations:

Currently, third level domain names may be registered in the .name TLD. This RSEP seeks to discontinue third level domain name registrations due to declining usage and limited registrar support of the service.

Upon discontinuation, no new third level domain names will be registered and existing third level domain names will be terminated.

How many registrants and domains will be affected by this move is not clear, but it’s not zero. Monthly transaction reports show .name has about 96,000 domains under management, but the mix between 2LD and 3LD is not disclosed.

It appears that the deletion of these arguably premium surnames will make them available for registration again, but it’s not yet clear how Verisign plans to handle this. The drop? Auctions? It’s not stated in the RSEP.

Verisign is also turning off the email forwarding service that GNR offered since launch 25 years ago.

This service offered users email aliases using .name domains. You could pay to have firstname@lastname.name forward to your Hotmail, for example, (this was 2002). The domain would belong to the registry, the user just got use of the alias.

Verisign says this will be discontinued and the associated email addresses and MX records removed. SLDs that were used by the service will become available for registration again after one year.

Again, it’s not clear how many users will be affected but it does not appear to be zero. Verisign said it will give its registrars 90 days notice before it turns off the service, though it seems they’re mostly already aware of it.

It was pretty clear almost from the outset that the three-level structure GNR originally proposed was not a great business model in practice. It only took a couple of years before it started selling .name SLDs as well.

New gTLD applicants take note — non-standard registration paths tend to be unpopular with registrants and registrars alike.

Verisign cranks up guidance as .com swells

Verisign has significantly bumped up its growth expectations for 2026, saying it expects to sell far more domains than previously thought.

The company said it expects its domain name base — the combined domains under management for .com and .net — to grow by between 3.1% and 4.3% over the course of the year.

That’s a notable increase from the prediction of 1.5% to 3.5% it made just three months ago.

Verisign ended March with 176.1 million names in its base, up 3.7% on a year earlier and 2.54 million domains during the three months of Q1.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the renewed growth came primarily as a result of marketing programs aimed at its registrars, its registrars return to a focus on customer acquisition, and AI web site creation tools.

Verisign reported Q1 revenue up 6.6% versus last year at $429 million, with net income up from $199 million to $215 million.

It threw cash at its shareholders, buying back $214 million of stock and giving them a $0.81-per-share dividend.

More Verisign bitchiness as .com price rise revealed

Verisign is putting up the price of a .com domain again, and it clearly wishes it could raise it even more.

The registry said that it will increase the base annual wholesale fee by 71 cents from $10.26 to $10.97 effective November 1 this year.

That’s the maximum 7% hike it’s permitted to impose under its trilateral arrangement with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce.

It’s the first announced price increase in two years. That’s because its contract only allows rises in the last four out the six years of its duration.

The company has never failed to exercise its price-raising powers, but it did freeze its fees during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But it has also never failed in recent years to make catty comments suggesting a profound bitterness that its prices are regulated at all.

Announcing Verisign’s first-quarter financial results last week, CEO Jim Bidzos said:

The new $10.97 price that will become effective November 1 is the maximum price that we can charge registrars. The registrars, however, are entirely price unrestricted and can sell .com registrations at any retail price they choose, and those prices often differ significantly from the price we are limited to.

This apparent frustration has been a prominent mantra since the company negotiated the latest version of the .com contract, during which Joe Biden’s Commerce had evidently wanted lower pricing and Verisign had pushed back with a call for greater regulation in downstream pricing.

Current .com registrants will be able to lock in their current prices by renewing their names for up to 10 (in practice usually nine) years before the price hike takes effect.