.boo domain names: registry, rules and cost

Charleston Road Registry Inc. is the IANA-listed sponsoring organisation for .boo, trading as Google Registry. It's a subsidiary of Google LLC, so the parent company standing behind .boo is Google, plain and simple. The nameservers, the machines that actually answer lookups for every .boo domain, are run directly by Charleston Road Registry itself rather than farmed out to some third-party backend provider (IANA). ICANN holds the policy reins, having signed a Base, Non-Sponsored Registry Agreement with Charleston Road Registry on 30 January 2014 (ICANN).

Three separate roles are at work here. The registry, Charleston Road Registry, writes the rulebook for .boo: the HTTPS requirement, pricing tiers, reserved-name policy, all of it. Registrars, GoDaddy, Gandi, 101domain and the like, are the accredited shops that actually sell .boo names to the public and deal with your account day to day; Gandi has held its accreditation since 2022 (Gandi). Then there's the registrant, which is you: the person or organisation that registers a name and holds the right to use it for the term of the registration. Your contract sits with whichever registrar you picked, not with Google Registry directly, which is exactly why support quality, add-ons and pricing shift from one registrar to the next even though the underlying registry rules never move.

.boo has open eligibility. No residency requirements, no business registration, no nexus rules. Anyone can register a .boo domain, first come first served (GoDaddy). That's set at the registry level, so no registrar can add its own restrictions on top.

There is one rule everyone has to follow, and it's technical rather than about who can register. The registry mandates HTTPS on every .boo site, and registrars have to disclose that before you check out (Google Registry). If you're going for a two-character letter/letter domain, you also can't imply any government or country-code affiliation, and names matching the IOC, Red Cross or IGO reserved list are locked to those organisations only.

Past that, it comes down to the registrar. Some throw in WHOIS privacy or DNSSEC for free, others charge extra or skip it entirely, and premium names are priced by the registry, not the registrar selling them. None of that touches eligibility. It just changes what you actually get for your money.

Moving a .boo domain works the same as any other generic top-level domain. Get the authorisation code (the EPP code) from your current registrar, hand it to the one you're moving to, and the transfer kicks off. One catch: ICANN's standard 60-day lock kicks in after a new registration, after a transfer, and after you change the registrant contact details. So a .boo name you just registered isn't going anywhere for two months.

Registration terms run one to ten years, in whole-year increments (101domain). Google Registry's pricing policy lays out three windows worth knowing: a 5-day Add Grace Period, a 45-day Auto-Renew Grace Period once the domain expires, and a 30-day Redemption Grace Period where a deleted domain can still be pulled back, for a restore fee (Google Registry pricing policy). Registrars don't all describe this the same way, though. One registrar we checked lists no renewal grace period whatsoever and simply says renew by the expiry date or lose it (101domain). Don't assume the registry's maximum grace period is what your registrar actually offers, check their own policy. And the restore fee itself isn't a fixed, registry-wide number, each registrar sets its own.

Google Registry's own promo material leans on the same handful of examples every time: treats.boo for confectionery brand Zolli Candy, ta.boo for musician and Black Eyed Peas member Taboo, and meetyour.boo for dating app Coffee Meets Bagel (get.boo). None of these are rebrands. They're all themed or campaign properties sitting alongside a company's main domain.

Before you point anything at a .boo name, know that the registry mandates HTTPS. The extension sits on the HSTS preload list, so browsers refuse plain HTTP connections outright, there's no unencrypted fallback to lean on (Google Registry registration policy). A valid TLS certificate has to be configured before launch, full stop, not bolted on later. Registrars are required to disclose this before you buy, so if the notice isn't there, ask why.

The registry's documentation says nothing about email deliverability or how spam filters treat .boo addresses. Test sending from any address on the domain before you rely on it for business correspondence, same as you'd do with any newer extension. Given the playful tone of the string itself, .boo suits a secondary or campaign domain better than a company's only address. Redirecting to or from a primary .com covers both bases, the memorable short name and a more neutral fallback. If you're naming something, check whether your string reads as an actual word or phrase once .boo is tacked on, that's the pattern behind every working example above.