.info domain names

What .info is

.info is short for information. It was built as an open, general-purpose extension for informational resources, though nothing has ever required a .info site to be informational. Its IANA type is a generic top-level domain (gTLD), non-sponsored. It was one of the first seven new gTLDs ICANN approved in late 2000 - the first real expansion of the namespace since the 1980s - and the most commercially successful of that cohort. Its IANA registration date is 26 June 2001, followed by a phased sunrise, landrush and general availability through the rest of that year.

The operator as of 2026 is Identity Digital Limited of Bellevue, Washington, whose IANA record was last updated on 10 March 2026. The company changed while the registry ran on continuously, which is why reference sites get this wrong. Afilias operated .info from launch, and also provided the .org back end for Public Interest Registry, until Donuts acquired it in late 2020; the combined business rebranded as Identity Digital in 2022. Both earlier names are wrong in the present tense.

Who can register .info

There are no eligibility restrictions. Anyone, anywhere, may register a .info for any lawful purpose - no nexus test, no documentation, no validation, no registry verification, and no obligation for the site to be informational or non-commercial.

The only check that touches a registrant is a registrar duty rather than a .info rule: under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars must verify the registrant's contact email or phone number. Ignore that message and the domain can be suspended.

What .info costs to own

.info has no price caps. It moved onto the standard base gTLD registry agreement in the 2019 legacy-TLD renewals, alongside .org, .biz and .asia, which removed the earlier cap structure.

Identity Digital raises prices in periodic portfolio-wide rounds. One took effect in early October 2024; a second on 6 October 2025 covered 231 top-level domains, with standard prices rising between 6% and 220% and a median increase of around 12%. A further adjustment reported as effective around 19 January 2026 covered .info alongside .pro and .io, and reached renewals and transfers as well as new registrations. Two protections come with the base agreement, and they are the most actionable pricing facts here: six months' notice of any increase, and the right to renew for up to ten years at the pre-increase price before it lands.

Unlike .com, .net and .org, .info has a genuine registry premium tier. In June 2024 Identity Digital released more than 20,000 premium domains across its portfolio, including one- and two-character .info names for the first time. Premium names in this model normally carry the elevated fee every year, not only at registration.

The biggest practical warning is the first year against the renewal: .info has been one of the most heavily discounted first-year extensions at retail for two decades, and the registry fee behind it is not. Restoring a lapsed name during the redemption grace period - the window after deletion in which only the original registrant may recover it - costs substantially more again.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.info uses the standard gTLD structure: a minimum of one year and a maximum of ten, in whole-year increments, with expiry never more than ten years out. Stacking renewals to that ceiling is how pre-increase pricing is locked in.

Transfers use the standard EPP authorization code - the per-domain authInfo secret proving the registrant authorised the move. There is no .info-specific mechanism, no tag change and no registry form. The losing registrar must supply the code and lift clientTransferProhibited within five days of a valid request, and a transfer adds a year to the term.

Three sixty-day locks apply: after initial registration, which bites constantly on aftermarket and drop-catch purchases; after a prior inter-registrar transfer; and after a Change of Registrant, which the registrant may opt out of, but only before the change is made. A reform approved by the GNSO Council on 12 March 2025 would abolish all three in favour of 720-hour locks and a time-limited Transfer Authorization Code, but no effective date has been published, so the sixty-day regime stands.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

.info is a thick registry: contact data is held at the registry rather than only at the sponsoring registrar, unlike .com and .net, which remain thin. A registry-level lookup returns a full record rather than a referral.

RDAP - the Registration Data Access Protocol - became the definitive source for gTLD registration data on 28 January 2025, replacing sunsetted WHOIS as the contractual system of record. Under ICANN's Registration Data Policy, in force since 21 August 2025, registrant name and contact details are redacted by default, with contact routed through an anonymised email address or a registrar web form. Privacy and proxy services are permitted: there is no registry-level prohibition, and most registrars bundle privacy.

DNSSEC and internationalised domain names are both supported, and .info has a strong record on each. The zone was signed on 1 September 2010 by Afilias, the first step of its Project Safeguard programme, when .info was the seventh largest TLD in the world. On IDNs it was the pioneer: in 2003 it became the first gTLD to support internationalised domain names.

Who .info suits, and who should avoid it

.info earns its place when the use case is genuinely informational, and struggles when asked to carry a consumer brand. It suits reference works, documentation, wikis, glossaries and directories; public-information services such as transit, civic, event and status pages, of which New York's mta.info is the canonical example; knowledge bases sitting alongside a main brand domain; multilingual projects, since info is legible across most European languages; and experimental projects where a short, available, cheap name is the whole requirement.

It is a poor choice for:

• Anyone whose business depends on email deliverability. .info has historically carried a poor abuse reputation, driven by years of free and near-free promotions that attracted throwaway registrations at scale, and some spam filters and mail gateways still weight it negatively. That is a long-running industry observation rather than a published current measurement - but discovering it after migrating a company's mail is expensive.
• Financial services, healthcare, legal practices and anyone asking a customer to trust a payment or credential form.
• Primary brand domains for consumer businesses that will be spoken aloud. People hear dot info and type dot com.

Common mistakes with .info

Registering on a near-free promotion without checking the renewal. This is the classic .info mistake and has been for twenty years. The gap between the promotional first year and a standard renewal is proportionally among the widest in the industry, and Identity Digital reprices in scheduled rounds that reach renewals.

Making a .info the primary business and email domain, then hitting deliverability problems. Legitimate mail from a .info can land in spam more often than identical mail from a .com, because of the extension's history rather than anything the sender did. Test delivery to major consumer and corporate providers, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured, before committing a company's mail flow.

Buying a registry premium .info without understanding that the premium price recurs. On .com there is no registry premium tier at all, so a high price always means a private seller. Identity Digital genuinely does tier .info names, and a premium name can carry the elevated fee every year you hold it.

The class of 2001, and the reputation that came with it

.info exists because ICANN decided in late 2000 to add seven new gTLDs to a namespace that had barely changed since the 1980s. The stated purpose was blunt: to take the pressure off .com. .info and .biz were delegated on the same day, and .info was the only one of the seven designed to be genuinely unrestricted - which made it the first real test of whether demand for domains was demand for names or demand for .com.

The launch also produced the rights-protection machinery every gTLD launch has used since. .info ran the first modern gTLD Sunrise Period, and showed immediately how counterintuitive trademark precedence can be: it let Caterpillar Inc. take cat.info ahead of any feline-related applicant. The Trademark Clearinghouse, the standardised Sunrise and the Claims notice service all descend from what went wrong here.

On its own terms the extension worked. .info passed 5.2 million registrations by April 2008, comfortably the best of the seven, and Verisign's first-quarter 2026 industry brief still ranks it sixth among gTLDs. New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority moved to mta.info after 11 September 2001 because it was short and easy to reach in an emergency, and it remains the MTA's public-facing domain today.

The reputation problem arrived with the volume. What is evidenced is the mechanism: .info was sold for years at deep discounts and given away in bundles, and registration cheap enough to buy in bulk attracts throwaway and abusive use, so some mail filters and security products came to weight the extension negatively. What is not established is a current published per-TLD measurement showing that a .info registered today is meaningfully riskier than the alternatives - the claim is a long-running observation, not a live statistic. If you are building an information resource that does not depend on your mail reaching an inbox, the residual risk is close to irrelevant; if your business runs on email, treat it as real until you have tested it yourself.