.mov domain: registry, eligibility and buyer notes

The .mov registry is run by Charleston Road Registry Inc., listed as both the IANA sponsoring organisation and the ICANN-contracted registry operator for the extension, under a base registry agreement signed 30 January 2014. Charleston Road Registry is a Google entity. The IANA record names Google Inc. as the administrative and technical contact, and the nameservers sit on Google's own charlestonroadregistry.com infrastructure. No separate third-party backend provider in sight. ICANN still sets the rules of the game, holding the registry to the terms of that agreement.

Under this setup, the registry (Charleston Road Registry) keeps the master database of every .mov name and decides the policy, including the HTTPS requirement covered below. Registrars, the retail outfits such as GoDaddy or Gandi that buyers actually deal with, sell registrations against that database and handle billing, support and DNS day to day. The registrant is whoever holds the registration, the buyer, and is on the hook to both the registry's policy and whatever terms of service their chosen registrar imposes. Because Google runs the registry and effectively owns the technical stack end to end, .mov has a shorter, flatter supply chain than a lot of gTLDs that farm their backend out to a separate registry services provider.

Most retail sources call .mov open registration, meaning anyone can grab a name first-come, first-served, no residency requirement, no licence, no trademark needed. GoDaddy's registration guide and several other registrars back this up, and it's the standard pattern for gTLDs run by Google Registry anyway.

Every other source contradicts this, and it reads like someone mixed up .mov with a different, geographically restricted extension. The ICANN registry agreement and Google's own policy documents mention no such geographic gate. We would treat that single source with a fair amount of suspicion.

The rule that actually is enforced at registry level is the HTTPS requirement. The .mov registration policy forces registrars to disclose, before you buy, that HTTPS has to be configured or the domain simply won't load in a browser. Beyond that there are the usual gTLD naming conventions (1 to 63 characters in the label), but nothing specific to .mov on top of that.

.mov domains move through the same ICANN transfer process as any other gTLD: unlock the domain at your current registrar, get hold of the authorisation code, then confirm the move with the registrar you're transferring to. There's no separate .mov-specific mechanism on record.

Registrars don't quite agree on term length. GoDaddy allows registrations from 1 to 10 years, while Gandi caps renewals at 1 to 9 years. Either way, the minimum is 1 year.

Google Registry's pricing policy says that for 30 days after a .mov domain gets deleted, a registrar can redeem it, subject to the registry's abuse policy and whatever restore fees apply. There's no published .mov-specific restore fee figure available, and nothing confirms exactly how long the pre-deletion grace period runs. Take generic figures from other gTLDs as a rough guide only, not as actual .mov policy.

Live examples are thin on the ground. Google Registry's own promo page points to David.mov, a video creator using it to host his work, and that's about the only real-world case study on offer. Registrar marketing fills the gap with hypotheticals: production houses, independent filmmakers, festivals. Nobody names actual sites beyond David.mov.

Before you buy one, know that HTTPS isn't a suggestion here. Google Registry's .mov registration policy forces registrars to warn buyers, before they hand over money, that HTTPS is mandatory for the domain to even load in a browser. The get.mov page backs this up: .mov sits on the HSTS preload list, so there's no skipping the SSL certificate.

Nothing in the sources we checked flags email deliverability or spam-filter problems specific to .mov. Given the HTTPS mandate and the obvious video association, this extension works best as a primary domain for a portfolio, reel or showcase site, not as some throwaway redirect. One naming tip worth taking seriously: steer clear of anything that looks like a generic filename, "invoice.mov" or "update.mov" and the like. That pattern has already caught the eye of security researchers, since it mimics the disguised file links used in phishing attempts.