ICANN’s antics rarely surprise me after close to a quarter-century of coverage, but today it’s published what I can only describe as its “Woke Manifesto” and while reading through it this afternoon I pretty much peeled my uvula raw and ragged, alternating as I did between howls of outrage and uncontrollable fits of incredulous laughter. On the latest step of its descent into solipsistic pomposity, Org has released its Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit, an interactive web page and associated documents and survey templates designed to help the ICANN community’s various constituencies become more d ..read more

The .my namespace is to be opened up to international registrants next month under a deal between the Malaysian registry and Caymans-based Internet Naming Co, according to INCO’s CEO. Shayan Rostam said that MYNIC will continue to be the registry for .my, but that INCO will take on operations outside Malaysia. The deal will allow non-Malaysians to register .my domains for the first time, he said. Currently, some registrars offer local presence services to get around the rules. INCO already runs a portfolio of gTLDs, the initial batch acquired from UNR a few years ago, and adding .my should bri ..read more

The Swiss government is relaxing the registration rules for its .swiss gTLD so that regular people will be able to register names there from next week. Previously available only to registered legal entities in Switzerland, from April 24 any Swiss person at home or abroad will also be able to buy .swiss domains. The TLD will still be heavily regulated, however. You’ll only be able to register domains that match your own name or the name that you are commonly known by. You won’t be able to register common family names without an accompanying given name. Swiss people living elsewhere will be able ..read more

The new .music gTLD registry says it will give away up to one million first-year domains over the next five weeks as part of its launch program, but there are of course plenty of catches. DotMusic says the domains are available to what it calls “Music Community Member Organizations” — think record labels and the like — until May 24 or it reaches a million names, whichever comes first. With not much more than a month to get on board and a fairly complex, multi-layered registration and verification process, it seems more likely that the promo will time out before it hits seven figures. .music is ..read more

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