Namecheap, a major domain registrar and hosting provider, has called for the termination of the Independent Review Process (IRP) it initiated against ICANN. According to Domain Incite, this took place as far back as last November although ICANN published the relevant information on its official website only last week.
The dispute concerned ICANN’s 2019 decision to remove price caps from the .ORG and .INFO domains upon renewing its contracts with their registries. Namecheap initiated the first IRP in February 2020. The proceedings lasted nearly three years and ultimately resulted in a significant win for the registrar: in 2023, a panel of independent arbitrators concluded that ICANN had failed to ensure the required level of transparency in its contract renewal process and had breached several provisions of its own charter.
However, the IRP decision allowed for differing interpretations and did not oblige ICANN to reinstate price caps for .ORG and .INFO. As no such reinstatement followed, Namecheap initiated a second IRP seeking to restore these limits. In parallel, the company also filed a lawsuit against ICANN in Los Angeles in 2024.
The case was ultimately decided against Namecheap last summer, and the IRP has now been terminated. The terms of the settlement remain undisclosed; it is only known that the parties agreed to bear their own costs associated with the IRP. The company has stated that it is terminating the process “without prejudice to any further rights,” meaning that, in theory, it retains the option to revisit the matter in the future. Nevertheless, industry experts consider such a scenario unlikely.
As a result, the removal of price caps from .ORG and .INFO remains in force. It is worth noting that the non-profit Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG domain, has maintained its registration prices. By contrast, Identity Digital, which manages .INFO, has implemented price increases following ICANN’s decision: the annual registration fee has risen from $10.84 in 2019 to approximately $19 today.
