ICANN’s new gTLD program hit a remarkable milestone earlier this month. Measured from the 2012 application window, on March 6 it officially overtook NASA’s Apollo Program, which put a dozen humans on the moon, in terms of duration. But some in the community coming out of ICANN 76 last week appear to be cautiously optimistic [...] Continue reading →

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee appears to be backpedaling on its commitment to permitting so-called “closed generic” gTLDs in the next application round. The GAC’s output from ICANN 76, which took place in Cancun last week, contains a paragraph that suggests that governments are reverting to their decade-old position that maybe closed generics are not a [...] Continue reading →

New gTLD portfolio Radix made $7.8 million from the sale of $100+ premium domains in 2022, over $5 million of which came from premium renewals. The company this week released its second-half premiums roundup, showing $4 million in total premium retail revenue, $2.7 million of which came from renewals. That follows first-half numbers of $3.8 [...] Continue reading →

The .com gTLD was a growth drag on domain name registrations in the fourth quarter, if the latest figures in Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief are to be believed. The industry closed out 2022 with 350.4 million domains all TLDs that the DNIB tracks (which excludes Freenom’s free ccTLDs), up half a million in the [...] Continue reading →

Identity Digital, which runs hundreds of gTLDs, has warned its network of registrars not to send payments to its Silicon Valley Bank account. SVB, America’s 16th-largest bank, was shut down on Friday by US financial regulators after a run on deposits. The failure has been described as the largest since the 2008 financial crisis. Identity [...] Continue reading →

UK Creative Ideas, the .art gTLD registry, has started offering its registrants the ability to register names on the blockchain-based alt-root Ethereum Name Service that exactly match their DNS names, for a one-time fee. CMO Jeff Sass said that for $20, paid in Ethereum coin, registrants can secure their exact-match on the ENS, with no [...] Continue reading →

The Brand Registry Group is to propose a set of principles for the next round of ICANN’s new gTLD program that it thinks would see the initial application fee slashed by more than half and some evaluations starting as early as this October. Under the proposals, TLD-curious applicants could get into the system for as [...] Continue reading →