Wholesale domains
If you've ever bought a domain, you know what a registrar is. It's where you buy a domain. GoDaddy pays millions for 30 second Super Bowl ads, so actually pretty much everyone knows what a registrar is. What you might not know is what a registry is.
If you do know what a registry is, sorry—the point is that most people don't. And I'm not saying there isn't more to registrars. They do more than sell domains: they upsell you email hosting, website building, and plenty more1. Some registrars even dabble in questionable behavior, like investing in their own domain portfolio using your search queries to decide which domains are sought after and therefore valuable. There are thousands of registrars, and their history has plenty of controversy and intrigue. But I'm not writing about registrars (for now—I'll certainly cover them later). I'm writing about their lesser known sibling, registries.
For every top-level domain (TLD) out there—and there are thousands—there's a registry that manages it. .com, .org, .xyz, .club, .ventures: they're all owned and managed by a registry. A company called Verisign operates both .com and .net. They sell .com domains wholesale to registrars who turn around and sell them to customers for a (thin) profit2. The current going rate Verisign charges registrars for a dot com is $10.26 per year. Verisign maintains over 170 million registrations of .com and .net domains, which means it earns over $1.5 billion in annual revenue from registrations alone.3 (Berkshire Hathaway is a longtime Verisign investor, btw.)
I mentioned there are thousands of TLDs. .you, .music, and .now are among a dozen or so new TLDs being rolled out this year. So how do they come about?
Domains were something of a wild west in the early- to mid-90s, so in 1998 a nonprofit with a mouthful of a name was set up for domain governance: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN (pronounced "I can" as in "I can help you get a name for the internet"). Registries sign agreements with ICANN that grant permission to run a TLD so long as they meet technical, operational, and financial requirements.
Registries bid for rights to TLDs in auctions run by ICANN. Sometimes they pay a lot. Blogging platform Automattic/WordPress4 paid $19 million for the rights to .blog in 2016. They made a big bet that bloggers would pay up for memorable domains. And they decide how much to charge. For example, pete.blog is a "premium" domain, so they're charging $500/yr for it. Whereas petemillspaugh.blog is only $20/yr. But pete.blog is available! No Pete out there wants it, especially when there are expressive alternatives like pete.garden for $24/yr and pete.football for $18/yr. Even though WordPress is still widely used, I have a hard time believing Automattic made back $20 million on .blog.
The range of TLD prices is kind of shocking. A registry for REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) sells .reit domains for a cool $1,000 per year. Another registry charges just $11 yearly for .xyz domains. Back to Verisign, they've caught backlash from recent price hikes on .com. They have a contract allowing price increases up to 7% per year for four years, and they've pretty much scraped up every last penny of that. In their defense, secondary market sales of dot coms are as strong as ever, and they are a for-profit company trying to return money to shareholders. But it's murky. ICANN is a nonprofit whose mission is to "ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet", and ICANN is who negotiates agreements with registries like Verisign. But, but, but—Verisign heavily funds ICANN. Verisign is ICANN's largest financial backer. As anti-monopoly policy wonk Laurel Kilgour puts it:
Verisign's monopoly over the .com top level domain is old enough to vote and drink5.
Verisign has been around since the early internet days, and there's a lot more to unpack there, which I'll save for another day. In the meantime, what about the other registries?
For some registries, it's all they do. That registry selling .xyz domains that I mentioned earlier is called XYZ, and they own the rights to 35 TLDs, like .lol, .baby, .mom, .dad, .ceo, and .audio. They say on their website that they've sold over 4 million domains. Another registry called Donuts raised over $100 million in venture capital to buy hundreds of TLDs (including what I think are some pretty good ones—like .email, .space, .band, .pizza—and ones I've used—like .life for weeksofyour.life).
But there are also registries you've actually heard of—just not for their registry business. Google runs a registry. So does Amazon. Sometimes they bid for TLDs that'll become available to the public, like Google paying $25 million for rights to .app, but other times they acquire TLDs for internal or branded use, like Amazon's .prime.
Some TLDs get stuck in closed systems and long-running litigation, like Amazon's ownership of .book. Amazon won the rights without any intention to sell .book domains to the public, which Barnes & Noble and other booksellers have challenged as too generic of a term to be locked away for Amazon's exclusive use. I would've loved to have a .book domain for this book. Google is also up against legal challenges to its bid for generic TLDs, like .search (which Amazon also applied for!).
I haven't even touched on registries for ccTLDs (country code top-level domains, like .de for Germany and .jp for Japan). Some countries run their own registries, and others partner with registries to capitalize on what can be a meaningful asset (as .ai has been for Anguilla, .me for Montenegro, .tv for Tuvalu, and many more). Anguilla switched to a partnership this year with a registry I mentioned earlier, Donuts (now called Identity Digital), to meet surging demand for its .ai domains, for example.
Reply
There's a lot about registries that I left out here in the interest of brevity. Reply with your unanswered questions, curiosities, and thoughts. Feedback helps me shape the book into something that resonates with you and other readers.
I'll be on a trip to Canada next week, so my next email won't be until September. Speaking of which, NYC friends: I'll be in town the week of 9/15! In the meantime, reply and forward to any friends or coworkers who you think would be interested in the book.
Footnotes
(1) WHOIS proxying, SSL certs, DNS hosting, broker services, auctions, etc.
(2) Or a loss! Beware the registrars who offer you promotional first-year pricing only to crank up the renewal costs once you're tied to your domain and lacking time or attention to switch.
(3) Revenue isn't quite as simple as the number of registrations multiplied by $10.26 because that price changes over time and domain buyers can lock in a price for multi-year renewals. Verisign reported $1.56b revenue in 2024 (https://investor.verisign.com/news-releases/news-release-details/verisign-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2024-results) and 170.5m registered domains at the end of Q2 2025 (https://investor.verisign.com/news-releases/news-release-details/verisign-reports-second-quarter-2025-results).
(4) Automattic is a WordPress hosting provider. WordPress open source software runs like a third to half of all websites in the world. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has been the source of heated WordPress controversy of late, during which nearly 1 in 10 Automattic employees have resigned. https://theverge.com/2024/9/27/24256361/wordpress-wp-engine-drama-explained-matt-mullenweg.
(5) Renewing Verisign’s Contract Would Hike Domain Name Prices at 2X Inflation Rate, New Economic Liberties Paper Reveals. Laurel Kilgour. 7-29-24. https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/renewing-verisigns-contract-would-hike-domain-name-prices-at-2x-inflation-rate-new-economic-liberties-paper-reveals.