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TLDH ditches .roma bid after GAC trouble
Kevin Murphy,
December 6, 2013, 19:23:38 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Top Level Domain Holdings has withdrawn its bid for the .roma gTLD, after apparently running afoul of the Italian government.
The gTLD was to represent the city of Rome, but Italy issued the company with an Early Warning (pdf) a year ago saying the company had “No involvement or support from the local authorities” and should withdraw.
TLDH disputed this, saying in November 2012:
In fact the Company had engaged extensively with the relevant local authority and will provide supporting documentation to the Italian GAC member. Once this evidence has been submitted, the Directors believe that the objection will be withdrawn.
The warning did not escalate to full-blown Governmental Advisory Committee advice, but .roma nevertheless failed Initial Evaluation (pdf) due to the lack of documented government support with its application.
The bid was eligible for Extended Evaluation, but it seems that TLDH was unable to get the required level of support or non-objection from Italy to allow the bid to pass.
It’s the second of TLDH’s applications to get killed off by a GAC member. It withdrew its non-geo application for .spa as soon as Belgium started making noises about its own city of Spa.
The company also ditched plans to apply for .mumbai in 2011 due to confusion about whether the city’s government actually supported it or not.
Too bad. .Roma would have been a great city tld this round. Probably just couldn’t come to terms.
Maybe we’ll see it next round.
Nation capitals like Rome require not only local government support, but federal government support as well. They probably had the first but not the later, and ended up not getting it.
and Italy thought it should be getting a piece of the action too. .
Maybe this is an example of what Chris Disspain was referring to at the last meeting of the GAC/Board.
The .spa withdrawal was unfortunate. It also would have been a great niche tld. Silly that a city with a generic word name can stop a generic tld application.
Because naturally, anytime someone types ‘spa’ into google, they are thinking of the city in Belgium.
.zulu was also a TLDH geo-like application that didn’t went thru
Porca la miseria