ICANN has confirmed that a phishing attack was responsible for the hacking of its Twitter account last night. The Org placed this statement, which suggested that the attack may have been more sophisticated than you might have thought, on its home page earlier this evening: On 11 February 2025, ICANN became aware of a successful […] The post Y...

Having two of its largest registrars advertising during Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast doesn't seem to have given Verisign's declining .com flagship much of a boost. According to numbers published on the company's web site, .com has grown by about 30,000 domains in the last two days. While that's certainly not to be sniffed it, it's […] The po...

Verisign is predicting more shrinkage at .com and .net in 2025, despite a few notes of optimism from its CEO. The company said last night that its two flagship gTLDs shrunk by a combined 3.7 million domains in 2024, a 2.1% decrease, as I flagged up a couple weeks ago, and that its growth this […] The post More gloom predicted for .com first a...

Could there be a .gz? I'm sometimes happy that DI has such a narrow beat. Today, it means I don't have to discuss the legal, political, moral or ethical implications of US President Donald Trump's just-announced plan for Gaza. At a press conference last night, Trump said he wants the Palestinians to leave Gaza, to […] The post Did Trump just ...

ICANN's Registration Data Request Service cost hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars every time it was used in its first year, according to an analysis of official stats. RDRS is the system designed to connect entities such as trademark owners, security researchers, and law enforcement with registrars, allowing them to request private domain r...

Public Interest Registry is set to join GlobalBlock, the multi-TLD trademark blocking network, following approval of a series of ICANN registry contract amendments. It will become easily the largest registry operator, by domains under management, to sign up for the service. But its crown jewel, .org, will not be included, I'm told. .charity, .found...

Amazon Registry has revealed launch dates for three of its long-dormant gTLDs, and they have the potential to be the most popular of its patchy portfolio. .free, .hot and .spot are to go to sunrise April 2, according to a notice on Amazon's web site and paperwork filed with ICANN. The Trademark Claims period, which […] The post .free domains ...

There are to be six fewer gTLDs on the internet, after ICANN terminated its registry contracts with two companies. Asia Green IT System's agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and . (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have been cancelled, after a lengthy compliance process, while Kerry Trading Co self-terminated .kerrylogistics. Despite being contracted for a dec...

ICANN has picked the beneficiaries of up to $10 million it plans to give away in the first year of its Grant Program. The board of directors approved the final slate of applicants, which will now have to sign contracts with ICANN, at its retreat this weekend. While the recipients will not be publicly named […] The post $10 million ICANN givea...

Domain registries and registrars are no longer obliged to offer Whois services as of today, the deadline ICANN set for formally sunsetting the protocol. It's been replaced by RDAP, the newer Registration Data Access Protocol, which offers a more structured way to deliver domain ownership information. Under ICANN's standard Registry Agreement and Re...

A typo in MasterCard's DNS configuration left the company open to hackers for years, it has emerged. As first reported by Krebs On Security, from June 2000 until this month one of mastercard.com's nameservers was set as akam.ne rather that akam.net, a domain used by DNS resolution provider Akamai. The .ne version, in Niger's ccTLD, […] The po...

ICANN could be faced with the headache of approving or rejecting a new gTLD containing a term broadly considered a slur for the first time. Unstoppable Domains has revealed that it is working with a client on an application for .retardio, which is linked to a memecoin cryptocurrency of the same name. Unstoppable says the […] The post Could IC...

Following on from the annual ccTLD growth statistics DI published last week, today we'll look at the gTLDs, where .shop was by far the biggest volume winner and .com was by far the biggest loser. GMO Registry's .shop added 1,315,000 names to its zone file in 2024, ending the year with 3,470,000 domains. It's now […] The post These are the TLD...

GoDaddy has agreed to roll out some pretty basic security measures and has been told to stop lying about how secure its hosting is, under an agreement with US regulators. It turns out that the company, while claiming that security "was at the core of everything we do", was failing to do some pretty basic […] The post GoDaddy ordered to stop l...

With all the excitement and concern surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence, the smart money might have been on .ai being the fastest-growing ccTLD in 2024. It wasn't. That honor instead goes to Russia's .ru, which grew by the largest number of domains last year of any of the ccTLDs that have so far published […] The post These are th...

People are trying to make a quick buck flogging domains matching the names of suspects in recent terrorist atrocities, but they're stopping short of including the hyphens. The 2024 Christmas-New Year period was marked by two vehicular terrorist incidents on either side of the Atlantic: the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany on December 2...

The domain industry may not be set to shrink, but it's not set to grow either, according to predictions in ICANN's newest draft budget, published this week. The Org's bean-counters have also confirmed that the recently announced fee increases for registries, registrars and registrants may become a "repeatable" occurence. ICANN says its budget for f...

Candidates from Verisign, Amazon, GoDaddy, Identity Digital, Tucows, and DotAsia have put themselves forward to become the domain name industry's next pick for the ICANN board of directors. The GNSO Contracted Parties House — registrars and registries — are currently holding an election to pick the next occupant of board seat 13, which ...

ICANN has come in for periodic criticism over the last decade or so for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in public about its new gTLD program, but this time around it's trying to do something about it. New gTLD program participants have said that ICANN should have thrown more of its substantial resources into marketing the […] The post New...

Companies that have not used their dot-brand gTLDs in a decade are nevertheless renewing their registry contracts with ICANN, leading to a situation where even ICANN seems to be benefiting directly from defensive registrations. In just the last month or so, the registries behind .delta, .cipriani, .gallup, .icbc, .frontier, .alibaba, .taobao and ot...

A domain registrar based in Jordan appears to have lost about a third of its gTLD domains under management after ICANN slammed it for its founder's televised antisemitic comments. Talal Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which goes by the name AGIP, saw a huge decline in DUM in February, a month after ICANN's then-CEO described Talal […] The...

IP lawyers in the ICANN community have come out swinging against proposed rules that would require them to come clean about who they work for, rules that are supported by registrars and governments. A proposed policy that would force lawyers to disclose the identities of their clients when they participate in policy-making would violate their [R...

Stuart Lawley, who battled ICANN to launch the .xxx gTLD, has reportedly died of a heart attack aged 61. AVN, a trade publication for the adult video industry, reported the news yesterday, citing his friend Greg Dumas. While Lawley did not found ICM Registry, he took it over early in its fight for .xxx and […] The post .xxx founder Stuart Law...

There's no going back now. After over a decade of politicking and policy development, ICANN has finally opened the doors to companies that want to participate in the new gTLD program's Next Round. You can't apply for a gTLD yet, but if you think you will and you want it on the cheap, you can […] The post The new gTLD Next Round is really happ...

Anguilla's .ai grew by almost 40,000 domains in the last two months, according to the registry, as the ccTLD continues to benefit from the growth of the artificial intelligence industry. Total registered domains was 572,575 domains on November 27, according to the registry web site. That's up 39,507 from the 533,068 it reported on October […]...

ICANN's Registration Data Request Service was used less often in October than in any other month since it launched a year ago, according to the latest statistics. There were 131 requests for private Whois data in the month, down from the previous low of 141 recorded in May and September's 189, the monthly report published […] The post RDRS us...

It's been a slow year for self-terminating dot-brand gTLDs, but today we've seen our third. Lipsy, a UK-based women's fashion retail brand owned by Next, has told ICANN it wants to end its Registry Agreement for .lipsy, which it has operated since 2016. What's unusual about this termination is that Lipsy actually had quite a […] The post A do...

Indonesia's .id appears to have become the newest ccTLD to be able to boast that it has passed the one million registered domains mark. PANDI, the local registry, is reporting on its web site that it currently has 1,073,779 registered domains. According to my database, it passed a million on November 14. At a time […] The post .id joins the m...

GoDaddy's .xxx gTLD will no longer be "sponsored", following a vote of ICANN's board of directors last week. At its ICANN 81 AGM in Istanbul, the board approved the renewal of GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry's Registry Agreement. The new deal closely follows the text of the standard RA most other gTLDs use, scrapping restrictions that […] The...

ICANN's board of directors has just voted to approve two bans on practices in the new gTLD program that could be considered "gaming". It's banned applicants for the same string from privately paying each other to drop out of contention, such as via private auctions, and has banned singular and plural versions of the same […] The post ICANN co...

US President-Elect Donald Trump's incoming administration is reportedly looking into torpedoing a deal between the UK and Mauritius that raises serious questions about the future of the .io ccTLD. According to The Independent, Trump wants to veto the deal that would see the UK cede sovereignty over most of the Chagos islands, currently known as [&#...

Almost every legacy gTLD is shrinking, but .org is thriving and recently hit a major milestone. Public Interest Registry announced yesterday that it's passed the 11 million registered names milestone, with CEO Jon Nevett calling it "a big moment for our organization". Looking at zone file records, it appears that the 11 million mark was […] T...

eBay has launched a television and radio advertising campaign featuring a slogan that looks very much like a domain name that the company does not actually own. The campaign, reportedly eBay's first global branding campaign in a decade, targets Gen Z customers looking for vintage and second-hand clothing and other goods. The new slogan is […]...

Forget China, Verisign is now seeing most of its domain sales weakness coming from the US. The company revealed in its quarterly earnings call last week that .com and .net were down by a combined 1.1 million names in the third quarter, and 850,000 of those losses were from American registrars. CEO Jim Bidzos told […] The post Americans are de...

The number of domain names registered worldwide decreased slightly in the third quarter, according to Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief. The total of 362.3 million domains was down 0.1 million on the quarter. It would have been up had it not been for a 1.1 million decline in the combined .com and .net gTLDs, […] The post Weak Q3 fo...

Prices in all gTLDs are likely to go up after ICANN told registries and registrars tonight that it plans to increase the fees it charges them, sometimes called its "tax", next year. The extra fee ICANN takes from from registrars for each new domain registration and renewal will increase from $0.18 to $0.20 at the […] The post ICANN says it WI...

Libyan ccTLD .ly is to get an Arabic version, ICANN has said. The TLD is . (Arabic reads left to right, so the dot goes at the end) and the ASCII Punycode that will actually show up in the DNS is .xn--mgbb7fyab. ICANN said that the string has passed the String Evaluation phase of the […] The post bit.? Libya to get its Arabic ccTLD first appe...

A Brit and a Canadian have been put forward to fill the seat on the ICANN board of directors that unexpectedly became vacant last month. The ccNSO-appointed seat 12 was left empty with the abrupt resignation of Katrina Sataki in September. Now, the ccNSO says two candidates will face election — Byron Holland, CEO of […] The post Two-hor...