A city gTLD launching exclusively on a blockchain alternative naming system? It’s happened, with the announcement of .austin at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The extension is already on sale at $10 a name via Unstoppable Domains, in partnership with the Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce. The organizations said the names will serve [...] Continue reading
Dying free-domains registry Freenom has shut down at least 12.6 million domains across three of its TLDs, according to research from Netcraft. Netcraft’s latest web server survey shows that the domains — across .tk, .cf and .gq — no longer resolve, according to the company. That’s 98.7% of the resolving domains Freenom had a [...] Continue reading
ICANN has published what could be the next version of GoDaddy’s .xxx registry contract, and is framing it as very much open to challenge. The proposed Registry Agreement would scrap the “sponsored” designation from .xxx, substantially reduce GoDaddy’s ICANN fees, and implement the strictest child-protection measures of any gTLD, as well as make ICANN Compliance’s [...] Continue reading
GoDaddy-led brand protection project GlobalBlock says it is already blocking over 2.5 million domains, just a couple of weeks after its formal launch. The GlobalBlock web site reports that 2,569,815 domains are currently being blocked across 559 extensions (a mix of ccTLDs, gTLDs, third-level domains and blockchain names), for an average of just under 4,600 [...] Continue reading
Microsoft is planning to move all of its Microsoft 365 apps off a multitude of .com domains and consolidate them all under .microsoft, its dot-brand gTLD. The company says it will move Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 web apps to the cloud.microsoft domain. They currently use domains such as outlook.office.com, teams.microsoft.com and microsoft365.com. It first [...] Continue reading
Transparency, an ICANN watchword since day one, was a noticeable undercurrent at the community’s 79th public meeting in Puerto Rico last week. The problem of lawyers representing unnamed clients in policy-making groups was raised in several fora, while another section of the community seems to have separately been infiltrated by the same kind of anonymous [...] Continue reading
A Los Angeles court has handed ICANN a victory in a lawsuit filed against it by a domainer who thinks he has the rights to register all the remaining single-character .com domains. Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com sued ICANN back in August, claiming the Org was breaking the law by refusing to allow him to register [...] Continue reading