One registrar controls 42% of FTSE 100 domain names

Nobody buys a FTSE 100 company's domain name from the same place they'd buy their own. The consumer registrar market — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains and the like — barely shows up here at all. Corporate domain registration is a different, much smaller, much more specialised business: brand-protection registrars, whose entire pitch is defending a company's name, its typo-variants, and its trademarks across hundreds of top-level domains at once, with enterprise support contracts and none of the self-service tooling a consumer registrar sells on.

We looked up the registrar of record for every FTSE 100 primary domain via RDAP — the structured, IETF-standard successor to WHOIS — for the 99 domains that returned one.

The concentration

Three brand-protection registrars — CSC, Com Laude, and MarkMonitor — between them hold 63% of the index. This isn't really comparable to consumer-registrar market share, where the biggest players fight over tens of millions of ordinary domains on thin margins. This is a specialised B2B service tier that mid-market registrars don't compete in at all: proactive trademark monitoring, coordinated takedown of typosquats and phishing lookalikes, and — not incidentally — the operational assurance that a company's primary domain can't be transferred, lapse, or get social-engineered away from under a small in-house team, because it's sitting inside an enterprise account built specifically to prevent that.

The same pattern shows up almost exactly in DNS hosting, which frequently comes bundled with the registrar relationship: CSC's own DNS product is the single largest nameserver provider in the index too. When one vendor holds both the registration and the DNS resolution for a company's primary domain, that vendor's own security posture becomes a meaningful part of the company's own — a dependency most annual reports don't mention.

Full registrar and DNS rankings: infrastructure analysis.