This week GoDaddy Registry announced it was expanding its registry services with the acquisition of more than 30 new generic top-level domains (new gTLDs), including 28 from Minds + Machines, .club and .design, plus the provision of registry services for .basketball and .rugby and Ally Financial’s branded .ally domain. The move will see the company add over 3 million domains under management to their portfolio, although GoDaddy Registry already provides registry services for .club’s 1.1 million domain names. Upon close of the acquisitions, it will see GoDaddy Registry own, manage or operate more than 240 top-level domains, with more than 14 million DUM.
Ethos Capital announced Thursday it has completed an investment to acquire a controlling interest of Donuts Inc. from Abry Partners. Based in Seattle, Washington, Donuts holds the world’s largest portfolio of top-level domains with 260 new gTLDs as well as providing registry services for a number of other top-level domains (both gTLDs and ccTLDs) through both its Donuts and Afilias brands.
Total new gTLD registrations have been on a downhill slide since late September 2020 according to nTLDstats.com and the decline is continuing. Verisign’s authorative Domain Name Industry Brief released this week reports that in the final quarter of 2020, new gTLD domain name registrations dropped 4.2 million to 26.0 million which equates to a drop of 13.8% compared to the third quarter of 2020. Over the year new gTLDs decreased by 3.3 million or 11.2%.
ShortDot is launching the Sunrise period for its fourth new gTLD on 10 March, the recently acquired .cfd, which they are promoting as being for #ClothingFashionDesign.
Uni Naming and Registry (or Uniregistry or UNR) is to offload its 23 new generic top-level domains (new gTLDs) in a one-day auction event on 28 April. The event will consist of separate no-reserve auctions for each of the 23 new gTLDs, giving bidders the flexibility to only acquire the Top Level Domains that fit their strategies or budgets.
With ICANN, like many other organisations, forced to move their meetings into the virtual space, there has been a lot of learning about what works, and doesn’t. About what people want. And don’t. So for ICANN69 there was a demand from the community for YouTube streaming, to which ICANN has acquiesced for a limited number of sessions. There have also been protections added to prevent malicious disruptions that have occurred in previous virtual meetings.
An interesting news observation. As possible antitrust investigations into four of the biggest tech companies are discussed, this week MarketWatch reported how “some big names in videogaming could speed up things” including Fortnite, which they note “is one of the initial conclusions of legal experts and developers following Epic Games Inc.’s lawsuits against Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for booting Epic’s hit videogame Fortnite out of their app stores Thursday.”
Back in April it was announced GoDaddy was acquiring Neustar’s registry services, and this week it was announced in a blog post on the new GoDaddy Registry website the deal had closed.
