George Hong
Founder & CEO
Guta.com

In 2020, businesses adapted to the pandemic by moving online. However, online companies faced challenges too. An example: many Asia based gambling or sports betting websites were out of business. These websites typically prefer numeric domains; their struggle is one of the reasons that total short numeric domain sales fell to a historic low since 2018 (According to Guta's Premium Domain Sales Observation Report). 

Due to global trade wars and government monetary policy controls, in 2020, it was much more challenging than in prior years for the Chinese buyers to convert CNY to USD and wire the money overseas. Compared to prior years, the number of investor buyers who sought our help to buy domains decreased, while the number of end-user buyers, who sought our help, increased. 

We see more and more Chinese domain investors buying/selling premium one-word .com domains from/to overseas. The quantity of western individuals and end-users entrusting Guta to purchase domain names from China has been increasing.

The pandemic has accelerated many trends. Some of them, such as the work from home and shop from home trends, will not reverse in 2021. More companies will allow employees to work from home permanently. For many businesses, the quality of their domain names is more important than their office locations.  

Global central banks had “printed” extraordinary amounts of fiat money in 2020 and will continue to do so in 2021. The Fed’s massive injection of fiat money will cause hyperinflation. Buying premium domain names is a smart way to protect against inflation. 

Bitcoin has been setting record highs in the first two weeks of 2021 after it blew past its previous high of $20,000 at the end of 2020. Bitcoin and Crypto Market will Boom in 2021. A robust cryptocurrency market means good things for the domain industry, as crypto companies and investors flush with extra cash as their cryptos rise are more likely to buy domain names. Furthermore, there are advantages of cryptocurrency payments over fiat money payments.

Guta has successfully brokered premium domain transactions paid via cryptocurrencies. I believe that increased cryptocurrency payment adoption among domain name buyers and sellers will lead to more domain name transactions. I expect domain sales in 2021 would be very active, and we will see a lot more high price domain sales reported than we did in 2020.

Bill Sweetman
President & Lead Ninja
Name Ninja

In February and March, due to the pandemic and general business mood at the time, Name Ninja proactively went into defensive mode and 'braced for impact'. I've managed several businesses successfully through global economic recessions in the past, so I knew the general playbook to use, although I was still on edge since this time things felt very different. We were fully expecting a downturn in our buyer brokerage business, especially after one mid-sized project was cancelled, so we took evasive action, watched our expenses and cash flow very closely, and secured additional business lines of credit so we could ride out the storm. We also tried to shower our loyal clients with lots of love and attention for sticking with us. 

Miraculously, that storm never came, and we saw a steady uptick in business from April onwards. We ended up having the second best year in the seven-year history of Name Ninja, and I partially credit that to the global awakening that companies the world over had that doing business means doing that business online via a Website using a great quality domain name. 

I also give major kudos to my amazing team of Ninja and freelance agents who were already used to

working remotely and really pitched in to help one another through a very challenging time. I know that many businesses suffered or collapsed last year, it was painful to see that devastation, so I feel very blessed to work in that rare business sector that actually saw business increase this past year. 2020 was a brutal year that really tested everyone's patience and strength and also forced us to focus on what's important in life. I feel very lucky to have survived the year, personally and professionally.

2021 is shaping up to be a huge year in the domain industry. The economy is going to improve, especially in some countries, and more and more businesses have realized the importance of using a great domain name. With innovative platforms like DAN.com and DNWE.com and others making bold moves in this space, 2021 is going to be an exciting year of change, disruption, and new opportunities the likes of which we haven't seen in over a decade. Here at Name Ninja, we're onboarding an additional Ninja to our team this month, and I'm no longer bracing for impact, I'm bracing for growth!

Sandeep Ramchandani
CEO, Radix Registry

Covid related challenges

When Covid hit, it filled our minds with a type of uncertainty we had not experienced before. We resisted the advice to lower our marketing investments, and to brace for an extremely challenging few years ahead as the global economy slips into recession. Every economic pundit was certain that Covid is the trigger which would end the economic boom that we had witnessed in the previous decade. Knowing that the growth in our business is correlated to the economic activity in general and birth-rate of new businesses more specifically, we did expect some short term detrimental impact which would last a couple of years at least.

I recollect a particular weekend in March when I received some enquiries from our founders regarding Covid’s impact on new sales. My response was "Nothing yet! As a matter of fact, we've just had our best weekend in 2020!" I expected that to be an aberration and that we would eventually start seeing a slow-down. I couldn’t be more wrong; as was evident in the months that followed.

Turned out that domain names, along with all sorts of digital products and services, would see a sharp boost followed by a sustainable acceleration in growth due to Covid. As cities started locking down, businesses of all types, and retail in particular, could no longer put 'building a website' on the backburner. Websites were suddenly elevated to becoming mission critical for every business, whether small or large, and across industries globally.

.store and .online for obvious reasons have seen the most uptake since March, but all other TLDs including .site, .fun and .tech have had one of their best years yet.

Major Non-Covid Event 

Registry Industry

One doesn't need to look back too far, or think too hard, to identify the Afilias sale to Donuts as the biggest event in Registry space last year. Afilias has been one of the most recognizable brands in our industry, and it played a big part in the development of the modern domains ecosystem. They also contributed to the ICANN community by setting new technical benchmarks, innovating in the DNS, and combating abuse. As someone who entered the industry at the time when .info was launched, for me, this marked the end of an era.

Domains Industry

The biggest, and easily the most shocking, event (or non-event) of the year was ICANN rejecting .org's sale to a private equity group, Ethos Capital. I was amongst those who assumed that ICANN's approval was a mere formality. ICANN's board must be given due credit for making the bold decision. There is a clear alignment between PIR's 'not for profit' status, and the purpose behind a vast majority of the .org registrants. Moving .org to a 'for-profit' private equity entity under the stated terms, and placing .org under a $360 million debt, would not be in any way serving the best interest of the 10 million+ .org user base. It enables ICANN to signal to the community at large that they are more than a 'rubber stamper', and that it can do what's necessary to uphold the interest of internet users at large.

Radix CEO Sandeep Ramchandani speaking at the 
2018 NamesCon Global conference in Las Vegas.

We see Covid as an accelerant. Large segments of customers sitting on the sidelines, not seeing it as necessary to set up a business website or adding e-commerce capabilities to their existing websites, now see their online presence as one of the ways to ensure survival in the post-Covid world.

Even after a majority of the world's population is vaccinated, and things start returning to normalcy, the way of doing business will be changed permanently. Having gone through a phase where digitization and virtuality was forced, those who operated in a 'high-touch', analog style, have tasted the gains in efficiency by adopting a virtual-first approach of doing business. And there's no going back!

Carvana, a platform where used-cars are purchased online, did $1.5 billion in revenue in Q3 2020 (up 43% yoy). How quickly has mankind gone from questioning the idea of buying everyday items on the Internet, to trusting a 100% online experience for buying a car? Cars are usually among the top three highest ticket purchases made by any household. Carvana buyers have no opportunity for a prior, real-life visual of the vehicle, leave aside taking it for a quick spin to see how it 'feels'.

If the ultimate, high touch, high ticket and high experience product can shift to online first, anything can, and over time, everything will.

Radix operates a bunch of great top level domains such as .online, .site, .fun, .tech, store amongst others. We feel extremely good about playing a more dominant role in powering the online addresses of the new generation entrepreneurs across industries.

Extremely excited over what's in (.)store in 2021. As more of the world moves (.)online and (.)websites gain more prominence, it's going to be a busy but (.)fun ride ;)

Zak Muscovitch
ICA General Counsel & 
Principal at The Muscovitch Law Firm

In my capacity as General Counsel to the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), I would say that one of the most significant events from 2020 was the rejection of the attempted acquisition of the .Org registry by Ethos Capital for 1.3 Billion dollars. In 2019, ICANN removed all price caps on .org domain names despite massive public opposition. The historical price caps were a crucial safeguard against unjustified price increases on a captive market of .org registrants. By removing price caps, ICANN paved the way for the attempted purchase of the entire .Org registry by Ethos Capital, who obviously determined that unrestrained price increases on a captive market made the .Org registry an even more lucrative take-over target. Some people believed that the fact that the .Org registry was in the hands of a not for profit, Public Interest Registry, was a sufficient guard against unbridled price increases on registrants, so when the purported Ethos Capital acquisition was announced, many people immediately realized that .Org registrants were likely to be subjected to unrestrained price increases by the new for profit owner. 

The harm of the impending price increases were compounded by the fact that many .Org

registrants are non-profit organizations such that cost increases would come at the expense of the services that they are providing, who are long entrenched on .org domain names, have no suitable alternatives, and in any event migration to another TLD would be impractical for many and would cause confusion and make them more vulnerable to fraudulent impostors.

Since ICANN had already demonstrated disregard for the public interest in removing price caps in the first place, many were fearful that ICANN would do the same thing again, and permit Ethos to take over the .Org registry. One of those fearful parties was the California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who on April 15, 2020, wrote to ICANN and urged ICANN to reject the transfer and let ICANN know that it would take “whatever action necessary” to protect registrants. This unprecedented intervention by a powerful governmental authority on ICANN’s normally independent decision-making demonstrated that ICANN was not trusted to make decisions in the public interest, having disregarded it in removing price caps in the first place, thereby setting the table for the purported acquisition. ICANN, under threat from the California Attorney General, was then compelled to reject the acquisition.

ICANN has a history of deferring to the large companies under its mandate and approving sweetheart deals that benefit those companies at the expense of the general public whose interests ICANN is supposed to represent.  It is unfortunate that it took outside action by the California AG's office to prevent this debacle.  We will only learn in the future whether the significance of ICANN's rejection of the sale of .org to Ethos Capital is that ICANN is unable to protect the interests of the general public on its own, or whether the significance is that this is a wake-up call alerting ICANN to its failure and that ICANN will now remember for whose interests it is supposed to be acting.  The significance of the event is also that ICANN was on notice that governmental authorities are prepared to intervene in the public interest when ICANN fails to do so.

ICA General Counsel Zak Muscovitch speaking at a meeting of Internet Commerce 
Association members at the 2020 NamesCon Global conference in Austin, Texas.

In terms of how Covid affected ICANN, well it cancelled all in-person meetings for the foreseeable future. Such meetings, which have historically been conducted in far-flung places 3-4 times a year have always been subject to criticism due to their expense and utility. So the cancelling due to Covid in some way, was arguably an improvement since it has been demonstrated that much of ICANN’s work can be effectively conducted online.  

2021 will see how the new Administration in Washington may affect .com pricing. Under the Trump Administration, ICANN and Verisign were permitted to raise prices on .com registrations despite no real justification for doing so. It is of course yet to be seen how new leadership at the NTIA, Department of Commerce, and Department of Justice views ICANN and its virtually perpetual no-bid contracts with registry service providers, but there is an expectation that improvements are possible.

On the UDRP front, 2021 will be the year that the UDRP is reviewed after 20+ years without any changes to it. ICANN will strike up a Working Group to review the UDRP so we can expect interested parties to advocate for changes to the UDRP which may negatively effect or improve the prospects for domain name registrants. I encourage all registrants who are concerned with or are affected by the UDRP, to contact me and get involved in the UDRP review.