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Earlier today, I had four Super Intelligence tools read On Holding AG’s financial statements and infer what the company paid for the ON.com domain name. Three of the four landed on roughly CHF 15 to 16 million, about USD $16 to 17 million, by spotting an anomalous CHF 16.4 million of additions to “Patents, licences and other rights” in 2022 and backing out the routine spending.
This post gets to the same number by a completely different road. To my knowledge, it is a road nobody has taken before in domain name reporting: inferring the original purchase price from the amortization the asset leaves behind in later years. The result is $16.7 million, give or take a couple of hundred thousand, and it is worth a post of its own, for reasons that go beyond ON.com.
This morning, dommunity posed a challenge on X: was the ON.com domain name acquired for more than $10 million? Kudos to dommunity, who is one of the few accounts in the domain name space that consistently produces valuable original content rather than regurgitating other people’s. The second half of the same post was a pointed remark about a certain kind of operator who waits for people like me to spend hundreds of hours on due diligence and then “lazily generate[s] engaging copy” from it. I will come back to that at the end.
According to a new SEC filing, the Tokens.com domain name has been sold for $5 million.
Neighbourhood Intelligence, Inc. states, on page 37:
Sale of Domain Name
On October 15, 2026, the Company entered into an agreement to sell its Tokens.com domain name to Abraham Strategies Limited for $5.0 million in cash. The transfer of the domain name was completed prior to the issuance of these financial statements, and the Company received the related cash proceeds on October 23, 2026.
Neighborhood Intelligence, Inc. was formerly known as Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc..
According to a LinkedIn post, the transaction was facilitated/brokered by Andrew Miller (ATM Holdings), David Peress (Hilco Global) and Lumis.
In a new financial filing made today, Shopify apparently revealed the purchase price of the Shop.com domain name: USD $99 million
Market America disclosed their sale of the domain name in a press release, however they did not state the transaction price.
In a prior analysis on LinkedIn, I argued that anything less than USD $400 million would be a steal for the buyer, given the enormous potential benefits that would flow to Shopify through their ownership of this domain name.
Shopify will have a conference call later this morning (before the financial markets begin trading), where they may share additional details regarding the transaction.
Some folks might not understand how I obtained the price. I inferred the transaction price from their earnings release, which shows "Acquisition of intangible assets" of $99 million on page 5. That's undoubtedly the Shop.com domain name (it was $0 in the same quarter of 2025, and is a way an accountant would disclose the transaction without actually identifying the domain name). [The EDGAR-hosted copy is Shopify's Q3 2026 earnings press release.]
In addition, their 10-Q filing reveals the same information. Page 11 shows the identical "Acquisition of intangible assets" of $99 million, and page 44 mentions "$99 million used for the acquisition of intangible assets" in the "Cash Flows From Investing Activities". [The EDGAR-hosted copy is Shopify's 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026.]
This represents the highest all-cash transaction price for a domain name, beating the prior AI.com domain name transaction price of $70 million. The new owner of the AI.com domain name claims to have rejected a $500 million offer for it.
However, the $872 million valuation (not a transaction) of the Cars.com domain name has yet to be topped.
This is breaking news, and this article may be further amended as this news is digested.
Since 1999, every domain name registrant who loses a UDRP case has had the same safety net. If you file a lawsuit within ten business days, the registrar puts the transfer on hold until a court decides. ICANN’s proposed rules for disputes brought by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) would remove that safety net in IGO cases.
While I continue to be "on strike" due to the low-life parasitic copycat bloggers who continue to not properly cite original research by others, here's a small taste of what I've been finding in my exhaustive research (I have found many others, that I've not shared).
According to a new SEC filing, the company Doc.com Inc. has revealed an ongoing lease for the doc.com domain name. According to Note 12 on page F-19:
On January 15, 2025, the CEO and President of the Company entered into a Domain Name Purchase and Sale Agreement for the acquisition of the domain name Doc.com. As of June 30, 2026, the Company had advanced $3.10 million to the seller. The total contractual purchase price is $4.85 million, payable in five installments, comprising an initial installment of $1.17 million followed by four equal installments of $920,000 each. The advance represents partial consideration paid toward the acquisition of the domain name and is not interest-bearing.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Company has the right to continue using the domain name pursuant to an existing license arrangement during the installment period. Legal ownership and registration of the domain name will transfer to the Company within seven days after payment of the fifth and final installment.
I believe that the $3.10 million on page F-19 is actually a typo, given that on page F-29, it says $3.01 million. And, if one does the math, $1.17 million + $0.92 million + $0.92 million = $3.01 million (leaving 2 more payments to reach $4.85 million).
This demonstrates the enormous value of short memorable domain names.
You have until Monday, August 10, 2026 (23:59 UTC) to tell ICANN what you think. Do not miss this deadline. Submit comments here.There will likely be no further opportunity to comment on these changes.
I've completed my company's comments to ICANN regarding their proposed changes to the UDRP and URS. These lopsided changes harm domain name registrants, and do not even faithfully apply the recommendations of the prior policy working groups.
The documents out for public comment are misaligned with the underlying policy recommendations, to the further detriment of registrants' fundamental rights to due process. ICANN takes every opportunity to hollow out the rights of domain name owners, especially when few are paying attention. The capture of the process is evident, given that the deviations from the policy recommendations are not random, but overwhelmingly go in favour of IGOs (like WIPO, OECD, etc.) and against registrants. The policy recommendations themselves were already unbalanced, and we expressed our opposition repeatedly. But, the implementation of the recommendations is even worse than the policies that the ICANN Board approved.
You can read my company's full submission in the PDF below (105 pages!), or via ICANN's public comment forum.
I sounded the alarm about the serious defects on Friday's blog post. I also made an AI-generated podcast earlier today that's a fairly good overview of why the topic is important to registrants.
Below is a quick summary of the submission, as posted to the ICANN comment forum. The 105-page PDF submission is relatively dense and technical, and is intended to be precise for all the (mostly) lawyers reviewing the submissions within ICANN's processes.
If you agree with our concerns, feel free to submit your own comment endorsing our submission. Or, if you need more time to study the issues, you should ask ICANN to extend the comment period, perhaps until the end of the summer.
Our position: the draft documents are not aligned with the policy recommendations the ICANN Board adopted in April 2023, and they are not close to it.
We identify 32 numbered changes needed across the three documents — 15 to the UDRP materials, 11 to the URS materials, 6 to the Policy Guidance — plus 11 further points about the process. The number matters less than the direction. Almost without exception, where the adopted recommendations gave a domain name registrant a protection, the drafts remove it, narrow it, or defer it to documents that have not been written; where the adopted recommendations gave intergovernmental organisations something, the drafts deliver it in full and sometimes add to it. A pattern that runs so consistently one way deserves an explanation.
One example, in plain language. The Board adopted a rule that a registrant who takes a dispute to court keeps the domain name while the case is heard. The drafts omit it. A registrant who exercises the very right the Board preserved would lose the name before any judge examines the case — and once a name has passed to an organisation that can assert immunity from national courts, recovering it is, in practice, extremely difficult.
The package is also incomplete. Which arbitration institutions will hear these cases, under what rules, and at what cost are all left blank. The community is being asked to approve a system whose operative content does not yet exist.
We therefore ask ICANN to extend this comment period. It falls across the northern-hemisphere summer; the material is long and technical; and the volume of defects that one outside reviewer found in a few weeks suggests the detailed review that should already have taken place has not. We encourage others — registrars, non-commercial users, and individual registrants — to read the drafts and file comments. Ensuring alignment is ICANN's obligation rather than the community's, but on this record it will not happen unless people say so.
Monday is the deadline to submit comments to ICANN regarding the changes to the UDRP and URS in relations to IGOs, which harm the fundamental rights of domain name owners, that I discussed in Friday's blog post.
I'm still working on my lengthy submission (over 100 pages long now), as the ICANN materials are replete with serious issues that harm registrants and I want to be as thorough as I can in the limited time available.
While I work on it further, I fed the latest draft into Google's NotebookLM AI tool, and it generated a relatively high quality podcast summarizing some of the issues.
Since my written submission will be quite technical and dense, folks might find the less technical AI-generated podcast to be more accessible as a general introduction to the issues. If you feel that more time is needed to study this issue, I encourage you to ask ICANN to extend the deadline to the end of summer, via their public comment tool.
You have until Monday, August 10, 2026 (23:59 UTC) to tell ICANN what you think. Do not miss this deadline. Submit comments here.There will likely be no further opportunity to comment on these changes.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I've spent more than a decade fighting ICANN's repeated attempts to carve out special privileges for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) at the expense of the fundamental rights of domain name registrants. I was a member of the original working group (2014–2018) that reached consensus against replacing the courts with arbitration. I was then shut out of the captured "EPDP" that reversed that outcome, and shut out again from the closed-door Implementation Review Team (IRT) that has now produced the draft rules ICANN published for public comment on June 30, 2026.
I've been digging through the draft implementation documents line by line, comparing them against the policy recommendations the ICANN Board actually adopted on April 30, 2023. I'll have much more to say about what I found (there's a lot), but one defect is so serious — and so indefensible — that it deserves its own RED ALERT post.
