.online domain names: who runs it and who can register

Radix Technologies Inc. SEZC is a Cayman Islands company, and it wears two hats for .online: it's the IANA-listed sponsoring organisation and the ICANN Registry Operator under a Base Registry Agreement dated 15 January 2015. There's no separate parent company sitting above it in the paperwork. The actual plumbing, the systems that answer lookups and process registrations, moved in 2025: Radix announced in August 2025 that Tucows Registry would take over back-end services for its portfolio, and its older policies page still names CentralNic Ltd, the previous provider. ICANN sits above both, holding Radix to the agreement it signed.

Three distinct roles are at work here, and mixing them up is where most registrant confusion starts. Radix, the registry, writes the rulebook for .online: pricing tiers, launch phases, which names get reserved. Registrars, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Domain.com and the rest, are the accredited storefronts that actually sell you the domain, and it's their contract you sign, not Radix's. Then there's you, the registrant, whose details land on the WHOIS record and who answers to both the registrar's terms and the registry's policies underneath them. These are three separate outfits, not one company wearing different name tags, so if something goes wrong, a price hike, a suspended name, you need to work out which level actually made the call before you know who to argue with.

.online has no registrant eligibility restrictions. The ICANN Registry Agreement classifies it as Non-Sponsored, which in plain terms means there's no defined community behind it and nobody has to prove residency, business status or trademark ownership before registering. Anyone, anywhere, can pick one up through an accredited registrar.

Where things get less uniform is registrar practice and Radix's own launch and pricing rules, both of which sit outside ICANN's eligibility policy. Radix's Launch Policy set a minimum one-year term during the original Sunrise and Landrush phases, reserved certain names for trademark holders with a Signed Mark Data file, and pushed some strings into Pricing Tiers that carry heavier registration, renewal and redemption fees. Those tiers and reserved names are a registry decision, one Radix can revise whenever it likes, not an ICANN eligibility rule, so a name priced as premium is simply a commercial classification, not a restriction on who's allowed to hold it. Standard, non-premium names come with no such conditions beyond the usual registrar account and payment requirements.

Transfers between registrars follow the standard ICANN policy that applies to every generic top-level domain: you need the AuthInfo (EPP) code from your current registrar, and the domain must be clear of any 60-day lock triggered by a first registration, a registrant-contact change or a previous transfer (ICANN). Nothing in the dossier points to Radix running a .online-specific override of this, so assume the standard rules apply.

Radix's own Launch Policy sets a minimum registration term of one year for names picked up during Sunrise and Landrush (Radix policies). No maximum term for .online turns up anywhere in the sources, so treat the usual gTLD ceiling as a working assumption rather than a confirmed rule for this extension.

What happens after expiry follows the same generic pattern used across gTLDs: a renewal grace period, then a redemption period where the name can be restored for a fee stacked on top of the standard renewal charge, then a short pending-delete window before the name is released back into the wild. One registrar, Spaceship, lists a .online redemption fee of $62.10 against $41.40 for .com (Spaceship), but that's a single retailer's price, not a registry-published schedule. Radix doesn't publish its own grace-period lengths or restore fee in the sources reviewed here, so exact timings and cost will come down to whichever registrar you're with.