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Did Google withdraw three new gTLD applications?

Kevin Murphy, August 10, 2012, 19:39:37 (UTC), Domain Registries

Is Google behind the three new gTLD applications that have already been withdrawn?
ICANN senior veep Kurt Pritz revealed yesterday that three applications were already on the scrap heap, long before they’ve been evaluated, but he didn’t say which ones.
After a helpful nudge from a DI commenter, my best guess now is that they’re Google’s applications for .and, .are and .est.
As I blogged here and reported here over a month ago, these three strings are all protected geographic names, under ICANN’s rules.
They’re the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes for the United Arab Emirates, Estonia and Andorra, which would be classified as country names and therefore banned by the Applicant Guidebook.
Many thanks to Silvia for the reminder.

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Comments (3)

  1. gtld fail says:

    Whatever. They are all going to fail so may as well pull rhem now and save some time and money.
    Disagree¿ Go by some.aeros.

  2. I totally agree with Kevin. Most of the new gTLD’s will fall. Lets keep the internet simple and free from complexity.
    The short good ccTLD’s are though gaining from ICANN’s greed, and in fact we, who work for the .is (dot is) are already experiencing good increase in registrations related to all the fuzz around ICANN theese days (bad marketing is better than no marketing :).
    Jens P. Jensen
    CEO, ISNIC.
    the .is Registry.
    Reykjavik, Iceland.
    1987-2012 (25 years).

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