The government of Montenegro has formally started creating a state-owned company to manage .me, the country’s ccTLD and one of the few country codes that built a global business, with more than a million registrations owed largely to its appeal to English speakers. The announcement came on August 2 from the office of Nik Gjeloshaj, Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Policy. Today the registry is operated by doMEn, a joint venture between two American companies, GoDaddy and Identity Digital, and the local firm ME-net. “Launching the process to establish a state-owned company that will manage the national .ME internet domain represents an important step towards returning the management of one of the country’s most valuable digital resources into the hands of the state,” the statement reads, translated from the original. The stated goals: digital sovereignty, control over a strategic resource, and keeping more of the money in the country.
A Third of the Money Stays Home. The Government Wants at Least Half
The money is not an abstraction, and the government has published its own arithmetic. According to a policy document from May, reported by Domain Incite:
- .me generated 114 million euros between its 2008 launch and 2025
- the state received 41 million euros of that, roughly 35-36 percent
- doMEn made 47 million euros in net profit over the same period, more than the state’s entire take
- the current split gives Montenegro 33 percent of regular registration revenue and 70 percent of premium sales
- the document’s conclusion is blunt: the state’s share should be at least 50 percent
The business being divided keeps growing. doMEn’s revenue reached almost 10.1 million euros in 2025 and, according to the document, has grown every year since the TLD launched.
What Actually Changes, and When
Less than the headline suggests, at least for now. One nuance matters up front: .me is already formally delegated to the government, so ownership of the TLD itself is not in question. What the new company changes is who operates the registry and where the profits land. The May document weighs three ownership models, from full state ownership to joint ownership with the back-end providers, and all three end with the government in ultimate control. On operations it is more cautious: it calls the current fully outsourced model the least risky option today, and sketches a path toward a hybrid, in which a state-owned registry would hold the core domain database while functions like DNS stay outsourced to specialists. A 2023 tender for a new operator was cancelled, and the documents suggest doMEn stays involved at least through a transition.
For anyone holding a .me domain, nothing changes today: registrations, renewals and transfers run as before, and the August announcement names no dates. The things worth watching are the ones that follow from the structure: who ends up running the back end, what happens to the registry agreement, and whether a state owner that wants a bigger share of revenue is tempted to raise wholesale prices.
A Precedent for the ccTLD Franchise Model
Domain Incite called Montenegro “the latest government to demand a bigger share of revenues from its national ccTLD”, and that framing is the story’s real weight. A handful of country codes, .me among them, became international brands operated by private, mostly foreign companies under agreements with the local state. Those agreements are concessions, and concessions can be renegotiated by the sovereign that granted them. For GoDaddy and Identity Digital, which built .me into a steadily growing eight-figure business over seventeen years, the message from Podgorica is that the growth continues, but the terms belong to Montenegro.
