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...

There is currently "no timeline" to remove the Soviet Union's ccTLD from the internet, according to ICANN's new CEO. Asked by yours truly during the Public Forum at ICANN 82 whether retirement proceedings had been initiated against .su, Kurt Lindqvist responded, according to the real-time transcript: ICANN has been in discussions with the managers ...

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 [&#...

Three more of Google's stockpile of long-dormant gTLDs showed signs of activity recently, strongly suggesting the company may be preparing to launch them. The domains get.eat, get.fly and get.here were all registered February 20, according to zone files and Whois records. While none yet resolve, Google typically uses "get" domains for its customer-...

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 […] The post Nova announces $45 million ...

South Korea's ccTLD registry is seeking to borrow from the success of repurposed ccTLDs, including .ai, with the release of four new third-level namespaces under .kr. This week local registry KISA started selling names in .ai.kr, .it.kr, .me.kr, and .io.kr, following the growth of the ccTLDs .ai, .it, .me and .io, which have all seen […] The ...

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 […] The post ICANN turns to ...

Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon, has been elected to serve on ICANN's board of directors, representing registries and registrars. He beat Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows, in the two-horse second round of voting, and five other candidates overall, to become the Contracted Parties House selection for Seat 13 on the boar...

Tucows has dramatically dropped out of ICANN's Registration Data Request Service pilot. The company said that RDRS provides a poor user experience that harms user privacy and causes ICANN to produce misleading usage statistics that show an artificially high request denial rate. RDRS is a bit more than half way through a two-year pilot designed [...

A Norwegian private equity company has dropped its plans to acquire Team Internet after Google changed the way it handles advertising on parked domains, a key source of revenue for the company. Oslo-based Verdane had a deadline of today to announce a formal offer for the company, but instead said it "does not intend to […] The post Google scu...

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company. The company said over the weekend that its channel has double since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based […] The post .a...

US president Donald Trump has indicated he is likely to back a UK-Mauritius treaty that puts the long-term future of .io domains into question. Speaking to the media yesterday after a meeting with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he was "inclined" to support the deal, which would see sovereignty of the Chagos Islands […] The post Tr...

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 […] The post As .com shrin...

The UK government has introduced legislation that would give police the power to order registries and registrars outside the country to take down domain names being used for serious crime. The new Crime and Policing Bill (pdf), published yesterday, is a sprawling piece of proposed legislation, covering everything from mobile phone theft to antisoci...

ICANN's country-code registries have picked their next representative for the ICANN board of directors. Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA won the seat, which was vacated last September with the abrupt resignation of incumbent Katrina Sataki, who had already been reelected for a second term. I believe Holland will join the board, af...

Nominet seems to have become the first major registry services provider to start to retire Whois across its portfolio, already cutting off service for about 70 top-level domains. Queries over port 43 to most of Nominet's former Whois servers are no longer returning responses, and their URLs have been removed from the respective TLDs' records [̷...

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 has applied to run .gcc, for Gulf Cooperation Council, in 2012. Its bid was rejected by ICANN the following year […] The post ICANN wins...

Verisign might have some better news for investors and analysts when it delivers its first-quarter financial results — it looks like .com might have turned a corner and returned to growth. The TLD has added over 540,000 domains to its zone file between the start of the year and February 20, a little over halfway […] The post .com could ...

The creation of the US Department of Government Efficiency raises the possibility of a government objection to .doge, a gTLD that D3 Global has announced it plans to apply for. D3, a domain name consultancy that is promising to deliver gTLDs in next year's application round that connect to identities currently only available on blockchains, […...

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 […] The pos...