The .GOV, which is the official US government domain, is in a period of change. In March 2021, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) became the registry of the domain zone, replacing the US General Services Administration in this capacity. A month later, the CISA made .GOV domain name registration free of charge, down from $400 a year previously.
The Domain Incite reports about the next changes. Cloudflare became the new technical operator of the domain zone. This company provides CDN services, DDoS protection and DNS servers. It is ICANN accredited as a domain registrar, but has not been directly involved in the domain business before. Its approval as the technical operator of the .GOV domain is a strong claim that things may change in the near future. Cloudflare, with its powerful infrastructure, is quite capable of ousting many players in the domain market. And the choice of the .GOV domain zone as a "launching pad" looks optimal. On the one hand, very few names are registered in the domain - about 8,600. On the other hand, the image advantages from managing the US government domain are absolutely obvious.
Previously, the technical operator of the .GOV domain was Verisign. According to Domain Incite, a tender for the right to technically manage the domain zone was announced by CISA in August last year. There is currently no information on whether Verisign participated in it. This is the second domain with which the company has recently lost work: last year, Verisign simply did not participate in the tender for the right to be the technical operator of the Tuvalu national domain .TV, which it had managed for many years (as a result, GoDaddy became the technical operator of the domain zone). However, it is unlikely that Verisign shareholders have a reason to worry: as long as the company remains the registry of the .COM domain, they have nothing to worry about.
