ICANN is heading into uncharted waters after a key community group flexed its powers to hold the Org accountable for a recent board decision. The At-Large Advisory Committee has become the first of ICANN's overseers to push for a formal objection to ICANN's decision to delay its next large-scale accountability review. In layman's terms, the […...

A surprising number of would-be back-end registry service providers have already been eliminated from ICANN's Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program for not submitting their applications in time. Program statistics for May recently published reveal that 19 potential RSPs were in the system but failed to submit their required information befor...

Why does .blockbuster still exist, seriously? Old-timers such as your humble correspondent will recall Blockbuster as the once world-conquering video rental chain that spectacularly failed to adapt to adapt to the era of Netflix and streaming and went almost completely out of business. I say almost because, as was widely reported a few years back, ...

Team Internet is to take over back-end duties for .co, after agreeing to take less than half as much as GoDaddy was charging. The London-based company has teamed up on a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia's communications ministry, MINTIC. The handover will put an […] The po...

No new gTLDs should be added to the internet until ICANN develops policies addressing the abuse of bulk domain name registrations, according to the Governmental Advisory Committee. The GAC this afternoon drafted formal Advice for the ICANN board stating that policy work on bulk regs should get underway before ICANN 84, which takes place in […...

ICANN's program to offer heavily discounted new gTLD application fees to certain organizations has so far seen little uptake, and some governments are not happy about it. The Applicant Support Program offers up to 45 qualified applicants a discount of up to 85% on their application fees. That's worth almost $200,000 each. ICANN will also […] ...

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". Then eyebrow-raising revelation came during an intervention from Susan Chalmers, the country's senior representative on the Governmental Advisory Committee, at the ICAN...

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 ., ., ., ., […] The post GoDaddy loses l...

Amazon is set to launch not two but at least three of its dormant new gTLDs in the next few months, according to ICANN documentation. As reported earlier this week, .talk and .fast are set to go to sunrise in August and general availability in September, and now they'll be joined by a third: .you. […] The post Third Amazon gTLD launch dates r...

.TOP Registry is off the ICANN naughty step, almost a year after it became the first registry to be hit by a public contract-breach notice over ICANN's latest rules on DNS abuse. The Org took the highly unusual step yesterday of publishing a blog post drawing attention to what it clearly sees as a big […] The post .TOP promises to play nice o...

A Los Angeles court has ruled against ICANN's attempt to have a former employee's sexual harassment lawsuit against it thrown out, which the plaintiff claims was an attempt to "silence" her. Tanzanica King, one of ICANN's longest-serving employees, sued ICANN last August, claiming that had been repeatedly sexually harassed by her superior and other...

ICANN has dragged its community to 60 cities around the world over the 26 years and 75 in-person meetings since its foundation, but that degree of globe-trotting could soon come to an end. A recently closed public comment period saw mixed responses to ICANN's plan to reform its meetings strategy, but there was little dissent […] The post An e...

Amazon Registry's launch of three gTLDs last week saw some registrants pay premium prices for .hot domain hacks. Zone file data shows domains such as moons.hot and slings.hot were registered towards to the end of the five-day Early Access Period, with the registrant likely paying close to a thousand bucks for each. cums.hot, longs.hot, moneys.hot, ...

A registrar that exclusively sells .gdn domain names seems to have gone AWOL, and ICANN Compliance is on its case. Dubai-based Intracom Middle East has been slapped with a breach notice alleging failures to operate a compliant RDAP server, publish the names of its officers, pay its ICANN fees, and escrow its registrant data. Some […] The post...

It's not exactly a U-turn, but ICANN has issued a statement clarifying that it's still committed to the values of "diversity and inclusion", if perhaps not the words themselves. CEO Kurt Lindqvist posted on the ICANN blog last night: While some terminology may have changed, the values that guide our work have not. Our actions […] The post ICA...

ICANN seems to have become the latest American organization to back away from commitments to "diversity" and "inclusion" in the wake of a universe now controlled by the whims of Donald Trump. The Org has recently started removing references to the D-word from its web site, sloppily editing its diversity-related web pages, replacing it with […...

Christian Kaufmann from Akamai has been reselected to represent the Address Supporting Organization on ICANN's board of directors. He's the incumbent in Seat 10, having first been picked by the ASO in 2022, but he faced competition this time from Australian Karl Kloppenborg of Reset Data. Kaufmann's current term ends at ICANN 84 in October, […...

Amazon Registry made three new gTLDs available to non-trademark-holders on Monday, and so far a handful registrants have taken up the offer of premium Early Access Period pricing. The five-day EAPs for .free, .hot and .spot see prices start high and decrease each day until May 17, when they'll settle at standard general availability pricing. [̷...

Singaporean drop-catching registrar Gname has added another 200 shell registrars to its collection, bringing its total to over 500. The 200 companies are named Gname 301 Inc through Gname 500 Inc. More accreditations means more connections to gTLD registries and a better chance to catch expired domains when they are deleted. Gname last boosted its ...

A domainer snapped up the .com matching the new Pope's name on the day the last Pope died. Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected this evening and took the name Pope Leo XIV. PopeLeoXIV.com was registered on the afternoon of April 21, a few hours after the news of Pope Francis' death was announced and after […] The post New Popes .com domain was...

DotMusic, the company that started selling .music domains seven months ago, has had a relatively successful launch, but one in four domains sold have not yet gone live. The latest registry transaction reports show that there were just over 30,000 registered .music domains at the end of January. Registry CEO Constantine Roussos tells us it's […...

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 […] The p...

ICANN is the stop funding and supporting the Universal Acceptance Working Group, an independent outside group tasked with making sure domain names work everywhere on the internet regardless of TLD or language. With no money or staff support, Org has likely signed the death warrant for the UASG, but ICANN insists it's not turning its […] The p...

A lesson in the importance of redundancy in your DNS architecture? The ccTLDs for Spain and Portugal seem to be largely unaffected by an ongoing power cut that has seen both countries go into blackout (metaphorically) for the last several hours. At time of writing, no explanation for the the outage, which has also affected […] The post .es an...

Verisign's .com returned to growth in the first quarter after the company offered its registrars marketing programs that substantially discounted the retail price of domains. The company ended the quarter with 169.8 million .com and .net domains under management, a 777,000-name increase on the end of 2024. It's the first time it's reported quarterl...

A Chinese clothing company has asked ICANN to delete its dot-brand gTLD, despite the fact that it is being used for web sites and email. Redstone Haute Couture wants rid of .redstone, which has been in active use for almost a decade. My database shows that it has about a dozen names, most registered in […] The post Dot-brand actually being us...

Remember January 20, 2025, about a thousand years ago, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States? Remember how the dais at the Capitol rotunda was stacked with tech bros including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, each of whom had authorized million-dollar donations to the Trump […] The po...

March saw the lowest number of requests for private Whois data via ICANN's Registration Data Request Service since the system launched in late 2023. ICANN's latest stats show that there were just 91 requests last month, compared to February's 143 and the previous low, from last November, of 103. The dip can probably attributed at […] The post...

The ccTLD from the defunct Soviet Union may be safe from deletion, judging by the ccNSO's latest pronouncement on the issue. It seems like, following a bit of a kerfuffle at ICANN 82 in Seattle last month, IANA has been sniffing around behind the scenes trying to figure out whether its own policy on ccTLD […] The post The Soviet Union might b...

Facebook owner Meta came away from the recent ICANN 82 public meeting unimpressed and wondering why the community doesn't actually seem to be doing much, according to the company's representative. Writing to ICANN's CEO and chair last week, head of IP and DNS Mia Brickhouse praised ICANN's organizational skills but said she was "concerned regarding...

Scrapping coffee breaks and cocktail receptions is among a raft of proposals ICANN has floated in an effort to cut the cost of its public meetings and get its budget under control. The Org is also thinking about making some meetings shorter or going online-only in order to cut costs, which were estimated to come […] The post ICANN spending $3...

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital. The company took over management of Anguilla's ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post. The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Name...

Long-serving ICANN community member and UK government representative Nigel Hickson has died, according to friends and colleagues. He's said to have died at the weekend following a battle with cancer. While the loss will be felt most keenly by his family, Hickson's absence will also be felt by the ICANN community and wider domain name […] The ...

Hilariously named .blog registry operator Knock Knock Whois There has been ordered to change its name to "Knock Knock RDAP There" or risk the wrath of ICANN Compliance. The company has been told it has 30 days to file papers requesting the name change with the California Secretary of State, or ICANN will initiate termination […] The post .blo...

Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and the .blog gTLD registry, says it's switching to Hello Registry from its current provider. Hello Registry is a joint venture of two like-minded national ccTLD non-profits: Canadian (.ca) registry CIRA and Dutch (.nl) registry SIDN. It was launched last November, having been developed under the name CIRA Regis...

The Columbian government has put the contract to run .co out for bidding, and it looks like the successful registry could make as much as $77 million over the lifetime of the deal. GoDaddy currently runs .co through its subsidiary .CO Internet, which it acquired when in bought Neustar five years ago. The government's RFP […] The post .co deal...

Having been one of the industry's notable growth stories over the last decade, Team Internet saw its revenue and profit go down in 2024, according to its latest earnings report. The company is also predicting a miserable 2025 as it tries to work around Google's decision to turn off advertising on parked domains by default […] The post Sales a...