New gTLD consultancy D3 Global has inked a deal to apply for the .ape gTLD on behalf of the ApeCoin community. The company said in a blog post that it will receive three million $APE — cryptocurrency coins currently worth about $5 million, according to Coinbase — in order to apply to ICANN for, operate and market .ape domains. As it has with other clients, it will first launch *ape names that can only be used on the relevant blockchain to address crypto wallets and such. D3 uses an asterisk to differentiate blockchain names from real domains. The deal came about after D3 submitted a proposal t ..read more

One of the companies in the Alibaba Group, China’s biggest registrar and one of the largest technology companies in the world, has been handed a breach notice, containing a long list of complaints including abuse failures and non-payment of fees, by ICANN Compliance. Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba’s four accredited registrars, failed to respond to abuse reports and failed to respond to ICANN’s requests for information about its failure to respond to abuse reports, the notice claims. The breach notice will likely to be the last to be sent out for claims under the current versi ..read more

Specialist new gTLD consultancy D3 is to hold a two-day conference in Las Vegas at the end of the month it’s describing as the “Davos for Web3 interoperability”. Imposingly named Dominion, it’s due to take place at the Cesar’s Palace hotel from April 29 to 30. The theme is the interoperability between the traditional domain name system and newer blockchain-based naming systems. Organizers says it’s invite-only, and limited to about 125 attendees, but an invitation can be requested from the event’s web site. Keynote speakers include Lily Liu (president of the Solana Foundation) and Fred Gregaar ..read more

A Canadian telecommunications company is turning off its dot-brand gTLD after it was acquired and its brand was deprecated. Shaw Cablesystems has told ICANN it no longer wants .shaw, so could the registry contract kindly be terminated. The move follows the company’s $26 billion acquisition by rival Rogers Communications, which closed a year ago. Rogers has been winding down the Shaw branding for the last nine months. But .shaw had never actually been used by Shaw, apart from the mandatory placeholder at nic.shaw, so it was likely circling the self-termination drain anyway even without the acqu ..read more

The number of domains registered to Germany-based dot-brand registries crossed the 10,000 mark in the last few weeks, thanks to a handful of enthusiastic registrants. That’s almost half of all the domains currently showing up in dot-brand zone files, which stands at just over 21,000, according to my database. German companies have been the most-prolific users of dot-brands, with the insurance company Deutsche Vermögensberatung (DVAG) currently accounting for over 7,500 domains. As well as having several corporate web sites on .dvag domains, DVAG gives out firstname-lastname.dvag domains to its ..read more

Corporate registrar Com Laude is losing four company founders as part of a new investment from the private equity firm PX3 Partners. The company said last weeks that founders Nick Wood and Lorna Gradden will exit the firm, along with Penny Hearn and Andrew Lothian, who founded Demys, which Com Laude acquired in 2018. Wood will stick around to consult for a while. The privately held, London-based registrar did not disclose the size of the investment or the new ownership structure, but it did say that former investor Vespa Capital is also out. Com Laude focuses on the corporate market and brand ..read more

Public Interest Registry is losing its long-serving policy veep Paul Diaz, who will leave the company and domain industry later this year. Currently VP of industry affairs, Diaz has been with the .org registry for 12 years, and had 12 years at Network Solutions before that. A quarter-century in the domain industry should be enough for anyone, and PIR said in a blog post that Diaz “will be retiring from the industry” when he leaves PIR in July. With his policy role, Diaz has held leadership positions in various ICANN committees, stakeholder groups and working groups over the years. The post PIR ..read more

ICANN’s two-year experiment in helping connect Whois users with registrars has grown its pool of participating registrars over the last few months, but it has lost a couple of not-insignificant companies along the way. The Registration Data Request Service launched in November, promising to provide a hub for people to request the private data in Whois records, which is usually redacted. Monthly usage reports, first published in January, showed 72 registrars had joined the scheme at launch. That number was up to 77, covering about 55% of all registered gTLD domain names, at the end of February ..read more

Ten million bucks of ICANN’s money is up for grabs, starting today. The Org has opened the application window for the first stage of its Grant Program, which it hopes to eventually see hand out over the $217 million that it raised auctioning off contested gTLDs during the 2012 new gTLD program application round. In this first phase, up to $10 million will be distributed, in tranches of between $50,000 and $500,000, to projects that align in some way with ICANN’s technical and internet governance missions. Only registered non-profits are allowed to apply. The application window is open until Ma ..read more

ICANN is set to loosen up its restrictions on single-character gTLDs in the 2026 application round, according to draft Applicant Guidebook language. But the exemption to the usual rule applies only to gTLDs written in one script — Han, which is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Applied-for Latin-script strings must be three characters and over (because two-letter strings are reserved for ccTLDs) and internationalized domain names in other, non-Han scripts have a minimum of two characters. The exemption for Han is being put in place because it’s an ideographic script, where a single charact ..read more