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Life insurance company kills dot-brand

Kevin Murphy, December 20, 2023, Domain Registries

An American life insurance company’s gTLD has become the 25th dot-brand to be abandoned in 2023.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America has asked ICANN to cancel its contract to run .guardian, which it has barely used.

The company had been running a newsletter at connect.guardian but interest in that seems to have dried up around 2020. No other .guardian domains had been registered.

It had been in a bit of a scuffle with UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media, which also applied for .guardian, during the application process.

The publisher settled for .theguardian instead, but abandoned that post-delegation in 2016, after selling sister newspaper brand .observer to Identity Digital.

Assuming the termination is not withdrawn, it will leave ICANN with 375 contracted dot-brands, from its initial total of 494.

ICANN to terminate Guardian’s last gTLD

Kevin Murphy, October 27, 2016, Domain Registries

Newspaper publisher Guardian News & Media is out of the gTLD game for good now, with ICANN saying this week that it will terminate its contract for the dot-brand, .theguardian.
It’s the 14th new gTLD registry agreement to be terminated by ICANN. All were dot-brands.
The organization has told Guardian that it started termination proceedings October 21, after the company failed to complete its required pre-delegation testing before already-extended deadlines.
.theguardian was the only possible gTLD remaining of the five that Guardian originally applied for.
It signed its registry agreement with ICANN in April 2015, but failed to go live within a year.
Guardian also applied for .guardian, which it decided not to pursue after facing competition from the insurance company of the same name.
The .observer gTLD, a dot-brand for its Sunday sister paper, was sold off to Top Level Spectrum last month and has since been delegated as a non-brand generic.
Applications for .gdn and .guardianmedia were withdrawn before Initial Evaluation had even finished.

First dot-brand gTLD to go generic after TLS deal

Kevin Murphy, September 5, 2016, Domain Registries

The would-be dot-brand gTLD .observer will actually open as an unrestricted generic after the contract was bought out by Top Level Spectrum.
TLS, which has a small portfolio of gTLDs already, bought out the ICANN contract from UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media a couple of months ago, it emerged today.
The Observer is the title of the Guardian’s sister paper, published on Sundays.
But TLS CEO Jay Westerdal said it will be sold as a generic with pricing under $10 per name, as a thematic stable-mate for its gripe-oriented gTLD .feedback.
The price of the TLD has not been revealed, but Westerdal characterized it as a sub-$1 million deal.
It’s the first instance of a dot-brand, albeit one that that not yet gone live, being taken over by a portfolio gTLD player.
Westerdal said he’s looking for more, similar acquisition opportunities.
The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, with no published go-live date.
The Guardian had signed a Registry Agreement containing Specification 9. That allows registries to disregard the Code of Conduct — which obliges them to treat registrars equally.
It seems likely this will have to be removed from the RA before .observer can go to the masses as a proper generic.

Second .online gTLD bid and third ‘guardian’ dot-brand withdrawn

Kevin Murphy, May 13, 2013, Domain Registries

Directi appears to be the last man standing in the three-way tie-up for .online, following the latest new gTLD withdrawals.
Namecheap has dropped its .online application, closely following Tucows, which dropped its bid a couple of weeks ago.
The three companies announced a deal in March to see them cooperate to win the contested TLD, but at the time it wasn’t clear which applicants would pull out.
Directi’s bid (filed by DotOnline Inc under the Radix brand) remains. It has already passed Initial Evaluation, which may be part of the reason its application was chosen as the “winner”.
The gTLD is still contested, however. Directi is competing with Donuts, I-Registry and Dot Online LLC.
Separately today, a curious two-way dot-brand battle seems to have had its final twist, with Guardian Life Insurance’s withdrawal of its application for .guardianlife.
The insurance company and newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media had both applied for gTLDs containing the string “guardian”. There were originally five, but only two remain.
It now looks like Guardian News will get .theguardian, having previously conceded .guardian to its brand rival and dropping its bid for .guardianmedia.
It appears that there’s been more than a bit of strategic applying, and maybe some deal-making, here.
Neither remaining application is contested, and neither have objections. It’s likely that .guardian is captured by the Governmental Advisory Committee’s advice against “closed generics”, however.