Identity Digital Takes .us From GoDaddy. The Registry Is Down 24 Percent in a Year.

For the first time since Neustar won the .us contract in 2001, the United States’ country code domain is moving to an operator outside the Neustar and GoDaddy Registry business. On October 1 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced that, “following an open and competitive selection process,” Identity Digital will be the new administrator of .us.

The registry it inherits has shrunk sharply. GoDaddy Registry’s monthly report for July 2026, the most recent published, counts 1,858,827 domains, 24.17 percent fewer than a year earlier. The latest flow indicators look better, though: new registrations in July were 5.56 percent above July 2025, and the latest renewal rate was slightly higher than a year before.

Key facts

• The contract: 36 months including a transition of up to nine months, then option periods that could extend it to seven years, as Domain Name Wire reports.
• The money: at the outgoing $6.50 wholesale price, July’s count implies about $12.1 million a year. Pricing under the new contract has not been announced.
• The decline: roughly 592,000 fewer .us names in July 2026 than a year earlier, on the registry’s own figures.
• The winner: Identity Digital, the former Donuts, which runs .io, holds the .au contract and has run Anguilla’s .ai registry platform since January 2025.

From Neustar to GoDaddy to Identity Digital

The 2019 award was announced as a ten-year contract, but much of that period consisted of option years, as Domain Name Wire noted. GoDaddy Registry’s operations were extended in June 2025 through August 2027, and NTIA opened a new competition later that year, initially hoping to name a winner by April and later aiming for June 30.

The award follows GoDaddy’s loss of the .co contract last year, which weighed on its revenue, according to Domain Name Wire. Both .co and .us came to GoDaddy with the Neustar purchase.

What the Contract Asked For

The draft request of December 2025 set a base term of three years with up to four one-year options, and required at least five years operating a top-level domain and at least two million domains under management. It also barred the registry operator from acting as a registrar for .us, a rule that would have excluded both GoDaddy and Identity Digital, which owns the registrar name.com, and, as Domain Name Wire put it, seemed to leave Verisign as the only real bidder. The final request of April 20 relaxed that rule. As Domain Name Wire reported it, the final version:

• Still required a US company, with foreign majority ownership of the contractor prohibited
• Still required experience running a large registry
• Allowed registry affiliates to run a .us registrar, subject to safeguards
• Asked for information on free speech safeguards to protect registrants’ First Amendment rights

NTIA’s April release said it would review proposals for “creative approaches to addressing DNS Abuse and other malicious conduct in the usTLD, enforcement of the U.S. nexus requirement, and efficient management of access to usTLD registrant data that balances the interests of all stakeholders.” The October announcement sets the goal of making .us “a gold standard, best-in-class country code Top Level Domain that demonstrates American innovation, leadership, and service on behalf of its registrants.”

Akram Atallah, Identity Digital’s chief executive, in a statement quoted by Domain Name Wire: “We are pleased the U.S. government selected Identity Digital to help run .us.” His stated priority now is “a smooth handoff.”

What the Registry Reports Show

GoDaddy Registry publishes a monthly operator report on about.us, about three months after the month it covers. Set side by side, the January and July reports show a base that kept shrinking while the latest monthly indicators improved.

The renewal rates lag because the registry waits out a 45-day grace period before counting them, so each report gives the rate for an earlier month. One month of higher new registrations does not make a trend, and the reports give no reason for either the fall or the July improvement.

NTIA’s October release describes .us as having more than two million domain names. On the registry’s July figures it is 141,173 below that mark.

At the outgoing $6.50 wholesale price, July’s count implies about $12.1 million a year in registry fees, the operator being paid by registrars rather than by the government, which NTIA describes as running the contract at no cost to itself. Domain Name Wire, which put GoDaddy’s loss at about $13 million on a round two million names, notes that first-year .us registrations are often discounted, so the real figure may be lower. Pricing under the new contract has not been announced.

What Registrars Face Before the Handover

For a hosting company or registrar that resells .us, a change of registry operator is a migration, inside a transition window of up to nine months. Three things are still open:

• The move of .us onto Identity Digital’s systems, which Atallah says will be planned “in close coordination with NTIA, and our registrar and channel partners”
• Wholesale pricing under the new contract, which an NTIA spokesperson told Domain Name Wire would be announced later
• The new operator’s approach to enforcing the US nexus requirement, which NTIA asked bidders to address

Identity Digital is not new to running a country’s namespace. It runs .io and holds the contract for Australia’s .au through the Afilias business it acquired. It signed a deal with the Government of Anguilla for .ai in October 2024, and since January 15, 2025 .ai has run exclusively on Identity Digital’s platform, a migration of more than 600,000 names that the company says took place without downtime.

The award, its stated aims and the request’s priorities are quoted from NTIA’s releases of October 1 and April 20, 2026, and the contract history and no-cost terms from NTIA’s .us Domain Space page and its 2019 release. The contract term, transition period, wholesale price, pricing note, .co loss and Akram Atallah’s statement are from Domain Name Wire’s report of October 1, and the draft and final requirements from its reports of December 15, 2025 and April 1 and 20, 2026. Registry figures are from GoDaddy Registry’s reports for January and July 2026.

The $12.1 million figure is our multiplication of the July domain count by the outgoing wholesale price, and does not account for discounts, premium names or locality names. The decline of about 592,000 names is our calculation from the 24.17 percent fall to 1,858,827. Identity Digital’s ownership and its 2022 renaming from Donuts are from Ethos Capital, and the .ai migration from Identity Digital. Neither Identity Digital nor GoDaddy was contacted for this article.