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Constantine Roussos’ DotMusic wins .Music domain

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Roussos beats Amazon, Google and others to win control of .Music.

.Music top level domain logo

The long battle for control of the .music top level domain name is owner.

Yesterday, DotMusic founder Constantine Roussos confirmed this his organization was the winning bidder in a private settlement for the extension:

DotMusic defeated a number of heavyweights including Google and Amazon.

.Music has been delayed for many years as Roussos fought legal and policy battles to get the domain.

I suspect the legal bills alone have totalled seven figures.

In the end, the competitors agreed to some sort of resolution. Most likely it was a private auction.

While I don’t agree with some of the tactics Roussos took along the way, he will certainly be a good steward for the .Music extension.

The .App “junk drop” is coming

by — Expired Domains 9 Comments

Expired domains are coming as first anniversary nears.

Image of trash with "The Junk Drop" written on it

In terms of domain name registration volume, .App has been a big success for Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL). The company’s .app top level domain name has nearly 400,000 domains in the zone after 11 months of general availability.

The one year anniversary of general availability is May 8, and that means the inevitable “junk drop” is coming.

The term refers to all the speculative (and sometimes defensive) domain name registrations that registrants drop one year after a top level domain launches. With so many domains coming up for renewal on the anniversary, domains under management inevitably drops.

It will be over a month after the anniversary before we get a clear picture of renewals and drops because of the grace period.

There doesn’t seem to be much of an aftermarket for .app domain names despite high registration volumes. Namebio shows a total of 15 public sales. I received multiple offers for Voicemail.app but none resulted in a sale.

 

New .Com Winners & Losers

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

NameSilo jumps on monthly list.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar report covers November 2018.

The only notable movement was NameSilo, which jumped from #10 to #6 on the monthly report. It’s currently the 11th largest .com registrar. You can read an interview with NameSilo’s CEO here.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations.

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 865,438 (893,103 in October)
2. Alibaba (HiChina) 312,227 (204,213)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 175,148 (183,542)
4. NameCheap Inc. 157,607 (139,033)
5. Xin Net Technology Corporation 152,143 (135,590)
6. NameSilo (CSE:URL) 130,713 (68,758)
7. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 123,087 (130,915)
8. Web.com++ 97,702 (105,815)
9. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 88,236 (92,312)
10. United Internet^ (FRA: UTDI) 66,501 (71,257)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of November 2018.

1. GoDaddy* 49,370,531 (49,222,603 in October)
2. Tucows** 12,659,835 (12,709,575)
3. Endurance+ 7,179,580 (7,240,990)
4. Web.com++ 6,732,478 (6,730,384)
5. Alibaba 6,192,801 (5,972,559)
6. United Internet^ 5,666,856 (5,675,949)
7. Namecheap 4,515,221 (4,452,551)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,792,514 (2,639,761)
9. Google 2,057,844 (2,005,816)
10. GMO 1,964,580 (1,975,188)

Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you

Google launches .Dev domain in general availability, free domains for I/O

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Google releases its latest top level domain name.

Google’s .dev top level domain name entered general availability today after a Dutch auction early access phase. Most registrars are offering the domains for $15 or less.

Over 2,000 .dev domains were added to the .dev zone file yesterday, bringing the total through sunrise and early access to just shy of 5,000 according to nTLDStats. About half of the domain are registered through Google’s own registrar.

The company is giving .dev domains away for one year to everyone who applied for a ticket to Google I/O 2019. The company declined to disclose to DNW how many domains this possibly represents.

I expect .dev to be popular with individual developers and development teams within companies. I don’t expect it to take off like .app did, though. .App currently has 370,000 domains in the zone.

.Dev uses HSTS preloading so all .dev domains need an SSL certificate in order to resolve. (Learn about HSTS preloading in this podcast with Google.)

Google’s .Dev domains are now available…for a hefty price

by — Services 1 Comment

Wealthy developers can get a .Dev domain today. Others should wait until next week.

Today is the first day that non-trademark holders can register domain names ending in .Dev.

Google is releasing the domain name in Early Access today. The Dutch-auction style phase started at 4:00PM UTC.

On the first day, expect to pay over $10,000 for the right to register a .dev domain. This drops to roughly $3,000 tomorrow and under $200 on Monday.

General availability begins February 28. Expect to pay around $10-$15 retail for .dev domains that Google has not marked as premium.

Google’s .app domain took off like a rocket ship last year and there are now more than 350,000 .app domains registered.

.Dev looks like it won’t be quite the same juggernaut. Sunrise trademark registrations appear to be lower than .app.