Identity Digital acquires another gTLD

Identity Digital has bulked out its already substantial portfolio of gTLDs, taking over the ICANN registry contract for another 2012-round string earlier this month.

The company is now running .onl via a newish affiliate called Jolly Host, according to ICANN records. It had been managed by Germany-based iRegistry, the original applicant.

.onl — short for “online” but with substantially fewer registrations than .online — had just shy of 24,000 registered names in its zone file today, but has been experiencing fairly consistent growth over the last few years.

It had 19,787 domains under management at the end of October, a lifetime peak.

Some of the growth may be due to the sub-$4 first-year fees currently being charged by some registrars. I believe the registry annual renewal fee is around $10, but some registrars mark that up to $25-$35.

.onl appears in the storefronts of most major registrars already.

Comment Tagged: .onl, ICANN, identity digital, iregistry, new gTLDs

Seven dead registrars on the out

When a registrar stops paying its registry partners, they tend to be cut off relatively quickly. ICANN takes a bit longer.

That seems to be what’s happening to a collection of accredited registrars under the same ownership, which have been given just a few weeks to pay over a year’s worth of overdue ICANN fees or lose their ability to sell names.

ICANN Compliance is gunning for Haveaname, InstantNames, MisterNIC, NetEstate, Neudomain, OpenName, and TopSystem for non-payment of fees going back at least to September 2024.

Probably not coincidentally, that’s the same month that all seven registrars abruptly lost all of their domains under management — not much more than 1,000 per registrar — and apparently lost its .com accreditation.

According to the ICANN notice, Compliance spent the last few months of 2024 unsuccessfully attempting to get in touch with the registrars, before ignoring the case for the whole of 2025 and only returning to it this month.

The registrar web sites are all simple placeholders, with broken SSL certs, doing the bare minimum to stay in compliance with the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement without actually attempting to sell any domains.

While almost all ICANN Compliance breach notices contain an allegation of unpaid fees, this is a rare instance where the allegations stop there; there’s no claim of any other breach.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, ICANN

Sav.com owner takes over .radio gTLD

The .radio gTLD appears to have changed hands, with a young registry affiliated with Sav.com taking over the reins.

ICANN documentation shows that Digity, a company led by Sav CEO Anthos Chrysanthou, took over the registry contract for the gTLD last month.

The original registry was the European Broadcasting Union, the entity behind the popular Eurovision Song Contest (.eurovision also exists, but is not used, with the EBU using a .vote domain during its annual broadcast).

Digity is already the contracted registry for .case, a former dot-brand it acquired from CentralNic a few years ago.

Apparently intended to be repurposed as a namespace for the legal profession, .case is yet to properly launch and has just a few dozen domains under management.

.radio, by contrast, if not exactly thriving in volume terms, is actually being sold and used, with about 3,000 DUM at a price point of just under $400 a year at the low end.

Some registration restrictions and pricing variations apply, and the gTLD does not have particularly broad registrar coverage.

British readers may be interested to learn that one of the highest-profile .radio domains belongs to oddball former DJ and TV host Noel Edmonds.

Comment Tagged: .case, .radio, acquisition, digity, ebu, new gTLDs

.com zone tops 160 million domains

The .com zone file contained more than 160 million domains for the first time today.

Registry operator Verisign is currently reporting 160,009,277 in the zone, with 162,479,075 .com names registered overall.

Names in the zone file are the ones with nameservers and therefore usable on the internet.

The milestone comes just over five years after the zone passed 150 million names, which happened January 13, 2021, according to my records.

The .com story has been a lumpy one in recent years, as registrars focused on increasing revenue per customer rather than shifting volume, but Verisign seems to have returned to steady growth in recent quarters.

Comment Tagged: .com, verisign

ai.com, the most-expensive domain sale ever

The domain name story that has it all? A record-setting sales price. A launch commercial during the US Super Bowl broadcast. A category-killer string reflecting the world’s hottest technology. It ticks a lot of boxes.

The domain ai.com sold almost a year ago for $70 million, according to Financial Times and the brokers, who negotiated the deal, beating the $30 million voice.com record set in 2019.

The seller was Arsyan Ismail, whose initials are AI, and the buyer was Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency exchange. The sell-side broker was Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The $70 million was reportedly paid in cryptocurrency rather than cash. Crypto-sceptics may worry whether this makes apples-to-apples comparisons with previous big sales appropriate.

Marszalek’s plan for the domain is to allow users to create autonomous AI agents that, rather just respond to chat prompts and instructions, are actually taken off-leash to perform tasks on behalf of their creators without waiting for permission.

The service was unveiled in an Super Bowl ad on Sunday, in a 30-second spot that encouraged viewers to create their usernames on on the currently pretty bare-bones ai.com web site.

The ad, which would have cost in the ball park of $8 million, was reportedly the most-successful of this year’s broadcast and caused the web site to crash under the weight of viewer curiosity.

1 Comment Tagged: ai.com, crypto.com, getyourdomain.com

.ai hits seven figures, raises prices

The .ai ccTLD recently crossed over the one million domain milestone and has raised its already substantial registration fee.

According to a social media post from the Government of Anguilla, .ai went into seven figures January 20.

For comparison, roughly a year earlier, .ai was at about 587,000 names. The growth is strong in this TLD.

The registry — technically the Government of Anguilla but outsourced to Identity Digital — has also raised the wholesale fee for .ai domains by 14.3%, according to TLDPriceChanges.com.

That means an extra 10 bucks a year. But .ai still has a two-year minimum commitment, so the price of a hand-reg has gone up $20.

Anguilla says the domain is now one of its primary sources of income and that the money is being channelled into local infrastructure projects.

1 Comment Tagged: ai, anguilla, idetnity digital

Typosquatter gets two years in jail

A man who used a typosquatted domain to defraud a man out of $146,000 has been given a two-year jail sentence in Australia.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, Indian national Pardeep Pardeep, who was in the country on a student visa and worked as an Uber driver, registered a typo of a local law firm, which the paper did not name.

He then used the domain to email a man who was attempting to buy a house, ultimately tricking him into paying him AUD 209,000, which he then used to buy gold bullion. The victim has been unable to recover his money, the SMH reported.

Pardeep, having spent nine months on remand, will be eligible for parole in June, the paper reported.

Comment Tagged: typosquatting

Epstein low-balled registrants to get his exact-match domain

Dead rapist Jeffrey Epstein tried to secure the .com and .net versions of his name by low-balling the existing registrants over relatively trivial amounts, according to the latest batch of “Epstein files” published at the weekend.

Epstein had his accountants make an “exploratory offer” of $1,000 for jeffreyepstein.com in July 2013, according to emails between Epstein, his accountant and an SEO specialist.

At the same time, the accountants said they planned to make a $500 offer to the registrant of jeffreyepstein.net, who had offered to transfer the domain for just $850.

I guess you don’t get to be an (alleged) billionaire without screwing over a few little guys.

The newly published files do not show whether Epstein ever successfully secured the .com version, but it seems he did acquire the .net, which was to be used as part of a shady-sounding SEO campaign aimed at restoring his reputation online.

An Archive.org cache shows that the .net domain was listed at HugeDomains for $895 as late as 2013. The released emails show a SEO specialist acquired it on Epstein’s behalf before February 2014.

Epstein was apparently angry that the first 75 pages of Google SERPs for his name contained nothing negative information, including mugshots taken following his arrest on child sex offences.

A reputation management specialist offered a suite of services aimed at reducing his exposure to this unwelcome attention through a variety of standard SEO techniques and dodgy-sounding tactics such as exploiting EU privacy law, creating fictional Jeffrey Epstein characters who would upload food and sports content, and “hacking”.

The .com domain is currently offered at GoDaddy for just shy of $10,000, while the .net redirects to epsteinwiki.com, a wiki devoted to exposing Epstein’s crimes.

Comment Tagged: epstein

Epstein bought “mother” domains for Fergie while serving time

Dead rapist Jeffrey Epstein registered several feminist-themed domain names for former Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson while he was serving time for sex trafficking a minor girl, the latest batch of “Epstein files” reveals.

Newly released emails show that Epstein’s assistant, Story Cowles, registered mothersarmy.com and themothersarmy.com, along with the .org and .net equivalents, using Epstein’s personal credit card, April 27, 2009.

At that time, Epstein was serving a cushy 18-month prison sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution, but reportedly was allowed out of prison to hang out at his lawyer’s office on a work release program.

The Mothers’ Army was a project Ferguson had planned to help women in need around the world, including rape victims. It doesn’t seem to have accomplished much and the company was closed in 2016.

The domains were registered with Network Solutions, published invoices show, and were eventually caught on the drop after Ferguson allowed them to expire. Some are now listed with BIN prices north of $5,000.

Emails show that Ferguson contacted Epstein in August 2011 to attempt to have the domains transferred to her and was told that she’d have to reimburse him the $600 he’d so far spent on registration and renewals.

Ferguson is the ex-wife of the former Prince Andrew. She lost her title Duchess of York last year when Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, was stripped of his titles due to his involvement with Epstein.

Comment Tagged: epstein, fergie

Two former ICANN directors want back in

Gluttons for punishment? ICANN’s At-Large Community has named the first four candidates standing to join the Org’s board of directors, and two of them have form.

Sébastien Bachollet, Justine Chew, Maureen Hilyard and Lito Ibarra have all put themselves forward to replace term-limited León Sánchez, who is due to leave seat 15 of ICANN’s board in October after nine years’ service.

Bachollet and Ibarra are both former ICANN directors. Bachollet served as an At-Large appointee for four years from 2010. Ibarra served six years as a Nominating Committee appointee from 2015.

France-based Bachollet is the former chair of EURALO, the Regional At-Large Organization for Europe, and a former director of Afnic, the French ccTLD registry.

Malaysia-based lawyer Chew has extensive experience both on the At-Large Advisory Committee and the GNSO, as ALAC Liaison, and policy-making groups. She also has sat on the boards of Malaysian non-profits.

Hilyard, from the Cook Islands, is a former ALAC chair who has held senior board or advisory positions with Public Interest Registry and DotAsia and ISOC. The NGO she leads, the Cook Islands Internet Action Group, plans to apply for a new gTLD this year.

Ibarra has been in charge of the El Salvador ccTLD registry for over 30 years and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He has sat on the boards of LACNIC and LACTLD.

At-Large has a complex structure and its electoral system reflects that, but essentially the nominees were self-selected and confirmed by a committee. The ALAC will vote with a view to announcing the successful candidate before April 22.

Comment Tagged: alac, at-large, board, election, ICANN