DropCatch now holds 45% of all ICANN registrar accreditations

TurnCommerce has expanded its DropCatch drop-catching service by securing 300 additional ICANN registrar accreditations, bringing its total to 1,501—45.2% of all active accreditations. The new accreditations, approved earlier this month, are held by shell companies named DropCatch.com 1546 LLC through DropCatch.com 1845 LLC and operate under the same NameBright infrastructure. This batch increases TurnCommerce’s share of the registrar market by roughly nine percentage points in a single move, further concentrating drop-catching capacity in its hands.

What changed

The 300 new accreditations, assigned IANA IDs 4590 to 4889, are not customer-facing registrars. Instead, they function as additional connections to gTLD registries, allowing DropCatch to submit more registration requests simultaneously when a domain expires. This tactic is not new—TurnCommerce has steadily grown its fleet over the past decade—but the scale of this batch is notable. In 2014, the company held 452 accreditations, or 31% of the market. By 2016, that number had risen to 1,252, or 43%. The latest addition pushes its share to 45.2%, with an additional 519 accreditations tied to SnapNames, a competing drop-catching service owned by Newfold Digital. Together, the two services account for 62% of all ICANN accreditations.

The financial implications are significant. ICANN charges a fixed annual fee of $4,000 per accreditation, meaning TurnCommerce’s 1,501 named accreditations cost approximately $6 million per year before variable and transaction fees. The variable fee pool, set at $3.8 million for the current fiscal year, is divided equally among all accredited registrars. Since drop-catching services generate a high volume of failed registration attempts, they do not qualify for fee exemptions available to smaller registrars, further increasing their share of the cost burden.

Why the expansion matters

The immediate impact is on drop-catching competition. Hosts and registrars running their own accredited services now face a larger fleet of competitors when bidding for expired domains. For most resellers, however, the change is less direct. Services like NameJet or SnapNames, which aggregate backorders, remain the primary interface for customers, and TurnCommerce’s expansion does not alter their pricing or availability.

The broader concern is the distortion of market metrics. The total number of ICANN accreditations is often cited as a measure of industry competition, but the figure is increasingly misleading. Stripping out the two largest drop-catching fleets, the number of registrars with customer-facing businesses is closer to 1,250—less than half the headline total. This discrepancy complicates comparisons between the registrar and hosting markets, where such shell entities do not exist in comparable numbers.

What it doesn’t show

The expansion does not signal increased demand for domains. TurnCommerce’s .com portfolio has shrunk in recent years, from 6 million names in late 2023 to 5.1 million a year later. The average number of domains caught per registrar per month has also declined, from 58 to 25. The move appears to be a strategic response to competition rather than a bet on market growth. By adding capacity, TurnCommerce may be aiming to capture a larger share of a shrinking pool of valuable expired domains, particularly against rivals like SnapNames, which operates with fewer accreditations.

For the registrar community, the expansion has mixed financial effects. While the fixed fees represent a significant cost, the addition of 300 new payers slightly reduces the per-registrar share of ICANN’s variable fee pool. This marginal relief is the only direct benefit for retail registrars, who otherwise face no change in their operations.