.dev domain names: who runs the registry and who can register

Dig into the IANA delegation record and you'll find Charleston Road Registry Inc. named as the sponsoring organisation for .dev. Same company shows up as operator of record on the ICANN registry agreement, signed 16 October 2014, according to ICANN. Charleston Road Registry is a Google LLC subsidiary, trading commercially as Google Registry. The administrative and technical contacts on the IANA record are still listed under Google Inc., per IANA. Name servers run on Charleston Road Registry's own infrastructure, no third-party backend provider anywhere in the dossier.

Three layers sit between Google and whoever registers a .dev name. The registry, Charleston Road Registry trading as Google Registry, writes the rules (mandatory HTTPS being the big one) and keeps the master database for every .dev domain in existence. Below that sits a registrar, one of the accredited companies you actually hand your money to, which deals with billing, DNS records and support tickets. Then there's you, the registrant, holding registration rights under the registry's policies and whatever terms your registrar bolts on top. Google doesn't sell .dev names to the public directly. It works through accredited registrars, the same registry-registrar split ICANN uses across the board.

.dev has no eligibility restrictions. Anyone can register, individual or company, anywhere in the world, with no geographic, professional or documentation requirements, according to GoDaddy's registrar guidance. You don't need to prove you're a developer or that you work in tech to buy one.

The one rule that applies across the board isn't really about eligibility at all, it's technical: the registry requires registrars to disclose, before purchase, that HTTPS is mandatory on .dev, because the extension sits on the HSTS preload list, per the .dev Registration Policy. Skip the certificate and your site simply won't load in a standard browser. There's also a specific rule for anyone registering a two-character letter/letter name: you have to confirm it doesn't falsely imply government or country-code affiliation. On top of that, reserved-name provisions carried over from ICANN's new gTLD programme protect names tied to the IOC, the Red Cross and various IGOs.

Past these registry-level rules, individual registrars can bolt on their own commercial practices, things like account or payment verification, but that's a business decision, not an eligibility gate set by the registry.

.dev domains change hands between registrars the same way almost every gTLD does: under the standard ICANN Transfer Policy. The losing registrar hands over an authorisation code, the registrant confirms with the new registrar, and the transfer goes through unless something blocks it, a dispute, say, or a lock placed after a recent registration or transfer. Nothing here is specific to .dev; it's the general ICANN transfer mechanism at work.

Every registrar checked offers a one-year minimum term (INWX, Dynadot, DNSimple). The maximum term is where things get messy: Dynadot, Gandi and DonDominio all allow registrations of up to ten years, yet one registrar's page caps it at a single year. Nothing in the available documentation explains the gap, and it's probably down to individual registrar policy rather than any registry-wide rule.

Google Registry's pricing policy gives a domain 45 days of auto-renew grace after expiry, and a registrar can still delete the name in that window to dodge the renewal charge. Delete it, and a 30-day redemption grace period kicks in, during which the name can only be restored, not renewed, and restoration comes at a price. That price swings a lot by registrar: roughly €70 at DonDominio versus $190 at DNSimple. Google doesn't publish its own wholesale restore fee, so registrars seem to be marking up whatever they're charged and calling it their retail rate. After redemption comes a short pending-delete window, a few days by most registrars' accounts, before the name finally drops back into the public pool.