Donuts quietly buys .shopping from Uniregistry (and .jetzt)
Just a few months after Uniregistry bought out Donuts to win .shopping, Donuts has bought the pre-launch gTLD back.
Donuts has also bought live gTLD .jetzt from a Swedish company.
The .shopping deal is a weird one.
Uniregistry and Donuts were the only two applicants for .shopping, until Uniregistry paid Donuts to withdraw its application back in January.
Uniregistry went on to sign its ICANN Registry Agreement in March, but less than a month later, April 27, transferred the contract to Donuts.
.shopping had been entangled in the .shop contention set, which was eventually resolved when GMO Registry paid $41.5 million at ICANN auction.
Despite the unusual circumstances, Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said today it was just the simple sale of a string. Donuts declined to comment. Neither revealed a price.
The second Donuts acquisition, closed April 26, was of .jetzt, which was applied for, delegated to and managed by New TLD Company AB of Sweden.
That gTLD, which is German for “.now”, has been in general availability for almost two years but has only 5,600 names in its zone file.
Donuts declined to comment, but it seems to me we’re looking at a failing gTLD looking for a white knight in this instance.
Recent Comments
SO what you are saying is most don't defend, but when they do its expensive and they win. So in most cases the ones that... read more
It is still in their Universal Terms of Service: "GoDaddy also reserves the right to charge you reasonable “administr... read more
In point of fact, several registrars charge their customers an administrative fee for handling UDRP disputes. -----... read more
The idea of having respondents pay $500 has a couple of flaws. First, in many of these dead-on cases the respondent n... read more
Respondents also incur an economic cost when due to a UDRP process with multiple layers of bias in favor of TM interests... read more
"Registrants, on the other hand, pay only for their own defence, if any." Mr. Wood ignores the fact that domain regis... read more
The key factor in the decision was a "Teflon survey" demonstrating that 75% of consumers associated booking.com with a p... read more
Page, see a separate comment below where I basically expanded on your statement, and presented an example where such a d... read more
The "answer" if you want to use a domain that contains "booking.com" for the same service offering is to leave the ".com... read more
The "answer" if you want to use a domain that contains "booking.com" for the same service offering is to leave the ".com... read more