.music has competition as .mu repositions

Identity Digital and it.com Domains are to market the Mauritius ccTLD, .mu, as an open alternative to the .music gTLD.

According to it.com, the ccTLD will be marketed internationally as “Everyone’s Music Domain”, starting with outreach at the trademark-focused INTA Annual Meeting in London this week.

It’s a non-sunrise sunrise period, being called the Trademark Priority Period, though this seems to be a case of branding rather than the imposition of any strict rules — .mu has been around for decades and domains there are already available to buy.

It’s rather a headsup period, it seems, with trademark owners being marketed to before the general public. This period will run from May 15 to June 28, it.com said.

Policies and launch details are expected to be announced soon.

There is already a domain for music, of course — .music. It’s a latecomer from the 2012 application round. It launched in late 2024 and had fewer than 30,000 domains under management at the end of 2025, and fewer than 7,500 names in its zone file today.

The issue with .music is that it’s a “community” gTLD, conceived at a time when concerns about music piracy online were a lot more acute than they are today, and it has registrant eligibility restrictions.

While .music domains have standard shopping cart friction and can begin resolving immediately, registrants are asked to complete a post-reg identity verification process that looks like a bit of a faff. Presumably, .mu domains will be less restrictive.

Pricing for the repurposed .mu has yet to be announced, but it’s on sale today with retail renewal pricing appearing to start at about $75 a year. That’s in the same ball-park as .music.

While rebadging .mu as a domain for music may initially hit like another case of a ccTLD trying to shoehorn itself into a meaning it was not intended to have, the use case is not without precedent. The rock band Muse has long used muse.mu for its web site, for example.

The rebranding of .mu comes about a year after Identity Digital took over the back-end registry services for the ccTLD in partnership with the Government of Mauritius.

1 Comment Tagged: .mu, .music, identity digital, it.com, mauritius

Over 100 new gTLD bids have already been announced

With the 2026 ICANN new gTLD application window now officially open, one striking difference compared to the 2012 round is the number of organizations that have broken cover to announce that they will apply.

Back in 2012, consultants excitedly pointed to Canon, the Japanese electronics firm, as the convincer. It had openly revealed it planned to apply for the dot-brand .canon two years earlier.

A handful of gTLDs related to communities, cities or causes — such as .gay, .nyc and .eco — had also been announced. Several had multiple announced applicants and were ultimately contested.

But today, with the application window now five days open, DI’s free risk analysis tool, Stringtel, currently has more than 100 announced applications in its database.

With dot-brands expected to make up a sizeable chunk of 2026 applications, very few major brands have actually put their heads above the parapet. Salesforce seems to be the most well-known, though its revelation came via an ICANN director’s conflict disclosure rather than a full-throated formal announcement.

The biggest cohort of announced applications seems to come from applicants representing an if not entirely then certainly uncommon type of gTLD — which you could call the non-dot-brand-dot-brand, or perhaps more simply “open dot-brand”.

By this I mean organizations, typically in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space, that have said they will apply for gTLDs matching their brand but make second-level domains available to their users, rather then keeping the whole namespace in-house.

There are dozens of such announced bids. Some are already selling domains that resolve on blockchains rather than DNS. Due to cost, complexity, or risk, I don’t expect every announcement in this space to translate into an eventual application.

We’ve also seen announcements of applications for generic strings, often in hot industries such as AI, crypto or podcasting. Stringtel already has records for the likes of .crypto, .agi, .podcast and .blockchain, for example. A couple, such as .chain and .anime, are already contested.

While we’ll likely discover how many applications ICANN has received not long after the application window closes in August, we won’t find out what strings have been applied for until October at the earliest.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, next round

2026 new gTLD round has actually opened

As of today, you can now apply to own a piece of the internet’s root zone for the first time since 2012.

Almost unbelievably, given some of its relatively recent history, ICANN has hit its deadline and opened up its systems for companies and organizations to file applications for new gTLDs.

The application window opened late April 30 and will close August 12. Many applicants will have been working on their bids for some time, but may hold out until later in the window to actually commit.

ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist said in a press release: “Whether building a brand for a company, spotlighting a geographic region or city, strengthening a community, or launching a business to offer domain names under a new registry, a new gTLD can be an innovative tool for commerce, security, and communication.”

ICANN noted that it’s expecting to receive applications for gTLDs in non-Latin scripts — 27 are available — to broaden the linguistic diversity of the DNS. Whether the Org has done enough awareness-raising outreach in non-Anglophone regions is an open question, however.

The cost of applying begins at $227,000. That’s the base application fee, but it will likely often be bumped up by thousands for applicants that need special extra evaluation services.

There’s also going to be an auction of last resort for competing applications for the same strings, where ICANN pockets the proceeds. Unlike the 2012 round, there’s no ICANN-endorsed pathway to privately resolving contention sets for cash.

As many as 75 organizations around the world may have qualified for the Applicant Support Program, which will subsidize application fees by as much as 80%.

We won’t know who has applied for what until probably around mid-October. Applicants then get two weeks to change their strings to their back-ups if they find themselves in unwelcome contention sets. Final strings are confirmed in November.

That’s all assuming the 2026 room is more or less the same size as the 2012 round, in which there were 1,930 applications. A larger batch of applications may delay things a little.

Applications can be filed via ICANN’s new TLD Application Management System (TAMS). The Org has also made a great number of documents and archived webinars available that talk prospective applicants through the process.

Applicants, or simply the curious, can also use DI’s free Stringtel tool to investigate the risks and opportunities associated with their chosen gTLD strings.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, next round

Nominet wants to fight shrinkage without self-abuse

Nominet has acknowledged that .uk has been shrinking for some time and wants to do something about it without accidentally inviting hordes of spammers and scammers into its zone.

The registry said this week that it is responding to calls from its registrar members by introducing a new .UK Growth Programme, set to launch June 3.

.uk peaked at 13,348,378 domains in July 2019 (that number includes second and third-level registrations) but it’s lost three million since then, reporting 10,371,270 names at the end of March.

Nominet is throwing money at the problem, saying the new program will offer registrars “either a .UK price promotion or marketing campaign funds”. Public details are scant, but the company said:

The marketing option would be competitive, with campaigns selected on their ROI potential, with caps to ensure a variety of members can take part. The promotions route would offer a discount on new registrations across the .UK family for the first year, during a specific month.

But Nominet acknowledged that discounts often lead to increased abuse and/or reg spikes followed by junk drops, and says it want to design its program to minimize these negate effects. How? The registry didn’t say.

Comment Tagged: .uk, nominet

Verisign cranks up guidance as .com swells

Verisign has significantly bumped up its growth expectations for 2026, saying it expects to sell far more domains than previously thought.

The company said it expects its domain name base — the combined domains under management for .com and .net — to grow by between 3.1% and 4.3% over the course of the year.

That’s a notable increase from the prediction of 1.5% to 3.5% it made just three months ago.

Verisign ended March with 176.1 million names in its base, up 3.7% on a year earlier and 2.54 million domains during the three months of Q1.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the renewed growth came primarily as a result of marketing programs aimed at its registrars, its registrars return to a focus on customer acquisition, and AI web site creation tools.

Verisign reported Q1 revenue up 6.6% versus last year at $429 million, with net income up from $199 million to $215 million.

It threw cash at its shareholders, buying back $214 million of stock and giving them a $0.81-per-share dividend.

Comment Tagged: earnings, verisign

More Verisign bitchiness as .com price rise revealed

Verisign is putting up the price of a .com domain again, and it clearly wishes it could raise it even more.

The registry said that it will increase the base annual wholesale fee by 71 cents from $10.26 to $10.97 effective November 1 this year.

That’s the maximum 7% hike it’s permitted to impose under its trilateral arrangement with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce.

It’s the first announced price increase in two years. That’s because its contract only allows rises in the last four out the six years of its duration.

The company has never failed to exercise its price-raising powers, but it did freeze its fees during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But it has also never failed in recent years to make catty comments suggesting a profound bitterness that its prices are regulated at all.

Announcing Verisign’s first-quarter financial results last week, CEO Jim Bidzos said:

The new $10.97 price that will become effective November 1 is the maximum price that we can charge registrars. The registrars, however, are entirely price unrestricted and can sell .com registrations at any retail price they choose, and those prices often differ significantly from the price we are limited to.

This apparent frustration has been a prominent mantra since the company negotiated the latest version of the .com contract, during which Joe Biden’s Commerce had evidently wanted lower pricing and Verisign had pushed back with a call for greater regulation in downstream pricing.

Current .com registrants will be able to lock in their current prices by renewing their names for up to 10 (in practice usually nine) years before the price hike takes effect.

2 Comments Tagged: .com, prices, verisign

Is a .tree gTLD very cool or very silly?

.tree is one of the first-ever publicly announced gTLD applications, predating even the 2012 application round, and it seems to have been proposed for a second time.

A web site using dottree.org, registered a week ago, is saying there’s a plan to apply for .tree in the forthcoming ICANN application round, with a charitable goal.

The project says it will donate a dollar from every .tree domain registration and annual renewal to a charity that plants trees in Dubai, with each $1 donation putting one tree in the ground.

At first glance, it seems like a nice idea, but I’m not sure it holds up to closer inspection.

There may be virtue-signalling advantages to running a site on a .tree domain if you’re in the environmental game or lumber business.

But if a registrant’s primarily interest is getting trees planted, why not just donate a buck to a reforestation charity directly? Why not donate the full amount you would otherwise have spent on the domain? Or more?

And how much demand would there be for .tree domains on their own merits?

Fortunately, DI’s new Stringtel tool has some data there. According to Stringtel, about 47,000 current .com/.net/.org domain names end in the substring “tree”, which may give an indication of potential registrations. About 2,000 of those end in “familytree”.

That’s the same frequency as we see domains end in “wine”, “dog”, or “paris”, and the three gTLDs matching those strings each have 17,000 to 18,000 domains under management, which is not terrible.

Should .tree perform just as well, envelope-based calculation suggest it would create the equivalent of a smallish forest that could be traversed on foot in minutes and not really suck much CO2 out of our increasingly fragile atmosphere.

But the .tree proposal would have a second forest of the same size planted in the second year (assuming 100% domain renewals) and so on. The effect would stack up over time, so maybe the idea does have merit.

1 Comment Tagged: .tree, ICANN, new gTLDs

The internet just got its first new TLD since 2022

There’s a new gTLD in the root, the first time ICANN has added a string in over four years.

Don’t get too excited though: it’s a dot-brand, kinda.

As of the weekend, .merck is live and resolving, though only the mandatory nic.merck registry domain exists right now.

The gTLD is interesting because it seems to be a rare example of two companies with the same name sharing a dot-brand.

The only other such arrangement I’m aware of is .sas, which is shared by the SAS Institute and SAS Airline, neither of which actually use it.

.merck seems to be jointly controlled by two pharmaceutical companies, one American and one German, both called Merck, which were under common ownership until World War I split them apart.

After they both applied for .merck in ICANN’s 2012 application round, over a decade of lawyering followed before they finally came to an arrangement.

There’s no Specification 13 in the .merck Registry Agreement, so it’s not technically an exclusive-use dot-brand at this time.

The back-end registry services provider, perhaps surprisingly, is South Africa-based DNS Africa, in what seems to be the company’s first deal outside its home continent.

1 Comment Tagged: delegation, dns africa, ICANN, merck, new gTLDs

Kid-friendly domains could be reborn

With governments around the world increasingly looking at reducing the harmful effects on the internet on children, it seems child-friendly domain name projects may see a resurgence.

The US government’s new hunt for a registry operator for .us, launched this week, contains a fairly explicit call for whichever company wins the contract to “revitalize” the long-dormant .kids.us space.

And I’m aware of one potential new gTLD applicant that wants to apply for a regulated kid-friendly gTLD when ICANN opens up its application window at the end of the month.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in its .us RFP:

The Contractor shall offer one or more innovative approaches to revitalize the use of the kids.us domain that are consistent with its objective of providing a safe space on the internet for children age 13 or younger, as intended by the Dot Kids Act. In the event a decision is made to reactivate the kids.us domain without any changes to the Dot Kids Act or selection of alternative uses, the Contractor shall be prepared to maintain and operate the second-level kids.us domain as specified by the Dot Kids Act.

It’s not the first time NTIA has tried to get the .us registry operator — now GoDaddy, formerly Neustar — to exhume the .kids.us project, which was closed down in 2012 after fewer than 1,000 registrations and half a dozen active web sites. Prior attempts were unsuccessful.

.kids.us was created by US legislation in 2002, largely as a way for legislators could feel good about themselves in an era when the web was still quite new and frightening and a lot wilder than it is today.

But that was before the dawn of social media and smartphones, the two technology trends driving much of the political focus on child online safety in the 2020s.

At least one new gTLD applicant intends to apply for a child-friendly gTLD this year, known as The Reservoir Project or (preliminarily) the Child Online Safety Association, run by lawyer S Harrison Knudson. The gTLD in question would be .haven.

The early-stage concept would see the registry work patent-pending technology and with ISPs, which would charge customers service fees and split the profit with the registry.

There are already two kid-oriented gTLDs out there — .kids itself and the Russian-language .дети (“.children”).

DotKids launched .kids in late 2022 and has so far accumulated 6,368 domains in its zone file. That’s actually not bad for a niche new gTLD, and based on some of the most uncomfortable Google searches I’ve ever done it looks like the registry is doing a pretty good job of keeping the namespace clean.

.дети has been around longer but has sold fewer domains, with just 1,358 names in its zone file today.

Comment Tagged: .haven, .kids, .kids.us, .us, .ДЕТИ, godaddy, new gTLDs, ntia

Shrinking .us TLD is up for grabs

The .us ccTLD may change registry operators in the not too distant future, but the domain is currently on a fairly steep downward trajectory in terms of registrations.

There’s also no guarantee that a new operator, should one be selected, would necessarily lead to lower prices for registrants.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration yesterday put the .us registry contract out for bidding, with a May 18 due date for offers.

Only the bigger players need apply — NTIA said it will only entertain offers from companies currently managing over two million domains in a single TLD.

That narrows the field quite a lot — only 27 TLDs I have numbers for clock in over two million. Incumbent GoDaddy qualifies, as does Verisign, Identity Digital, and Public Interest Registry.

CentralNic, Tucows, and a handful of non-US ccTLD operators also would be technically eligible, but the NTIA has ruled out any provider that is majority foreign-owned. The successful RSP would have to be fully based on US turf.

But .us has seen its DUM decline in recent months. As of January, it stood at 2,175,340, according to NTIA documents. That’s down from a peak of 2,575,574 just six months earlier, a not-insignificant dip.

On the upside, this is a different type of ccTLD contract to the likes of .ai or .co — the US government doesn’t want a cut of registration fees. The registry gets to pocket the lot.

How much “the lot” is isn’t exactly clear. Prior to 2019, GoDaddy predecessor Neustar was charging $6.50 a year wholesale, but references to pricing are redacted from the current NTIA contract.

So there’s a different pricing dynamic here. Registries competing for the deal can’t rely on bribing the government with a bigger slice of the pie, and NTIA has let it be known that a lower fee is not necessarily a good thing.

The pricing model will have to be in the “public interest” according to the tender. The NTIA documentation states that it will have to balance “the accessibility of .us domains to qualified registrants” and “the safety and security of the usTLD”, adding:

Offerors are advised that the lowest registration fee for a .us domain may not necessarily be in the overall best interest of the administration of the usTLD. The Government may decide to award to a vendor with other than the lowest cost fee structure or other than the highest cost fee structure.

It’s quite possible that the US will choose to stick with GoDaddy, but it’s perhaps worth noting that the current contract still has one unexercised extension option that would let it run until 2029, rather than the current 2027 expiration date.

1 Comment Tagged: .us, godaddy, ntia