Will more registrars stop supporting certain new gtlds ?

by

newgtlds2

A little over a week ago Adam Yamada-Hanff broke the story about NameCheap no longer supporting .xyz.

According to the article NameCheap made the decision to end their registration support for .xyz.

Here is a chat transcript between Adam and NameCheap support:

Dmitriy O.: Yes, regretfully, Namecheap does not provide the registration of .XYZ anymore.

Adam: You will accept renewals though?

Adam: When was this decision made?

Dmitriy O.: This was implemented recently, maybe week or two ago. The renewal of existing domains will go through without any issues. Regretfully, this decision was made on the top level and we do not have any info regarding this

Adam updated the story today that the ban was permanent.

Some on Namepros championed this decision for their own personal reasons. If I were to guess, they just don’t like .xyz.

Some including Adam himself, hoped NameCheap would discontinue support for more new gtlds.

Now put aside feelings on the specific extension, how this shakes out with customers may prove to be a problem for registrars. Domain investors want their registrar to provide them as many options as well. If a domain investor likes a particular extension and their favorite registrar discontinues support, this may make some customers irate and they might make the move to transfer all their domains out.

If ending support for new gtlds becomes a trend (it’s not at the moment) it might be an opportunity for other registrars to gain whole portfolios of the disenfranchised new gtld investor who also owns some legacy tlds. The TLD Wars might start heating up.

Comments

  1. Max Force says

    I’m more likely to believe it has something to do with bad business practices by Daniel Negari and his crew, rather than Namecheap just not liking .XYZ as an extension. Their company is poorly run and a revolving door when it comes to employees. I’d also bet the only reason it’s staying alive is due to their Rightside sell-offs and their (also failing) IT Media lead generation business for payday loans.

  2. Colin Campbell says

    .CLUB and NameCheap have always had a great relationship. We continue to work closely with them on multiple projects and will be partners for years. To extrapolate the dropping of one questionably viable gTLD as being a potential trend is not a good conclusion.

    Colin (.club)

  7. scrivener3 says

    Registers that cater to domain investors will carry all gTLDs. Maybe a millionth of one percent of new registrations are to domain investors. Domain name investors demand the lowest registration fess of anyone.

    Registers that have real active businessmen using their services, people who have web sites, email,
    ssl certificates, marketing programs, would be wasting the time of their customers showing new gTLD’s to them when they search for a keyword or a com to register. The customer would be confused by the extension, which they never see on the Internet. The register basically should be paid to display some thing like yourname.xyz or yourname.club right next to a valuable property like yourname.com or yourname.net. It is advertising for the new gTLDs and they should pay for it. judging by how little they spend to promote thier product, they can;t be bothered and more real production registers will drop them.

  8. Richard Morley says

    We offer our clients over 1400 TLDs which is why they consolidated their portfolios with us in the first place.

    Companies are realising that centralising their portfolios with a single provider saves time in maintains the portfolio, in addition to lessening the chances of allowing domains to drop. The more extensions you are able to provide, the more likely you are to be considered for such projects. Retail registrars such as Namecheap make so little per domain that I not surprised they are having to thin out their accreditations.