Ten more new gTLDs get ICANN contracts
.bar, .pub, .fish, .actor, .caravan, .saarland, .yokohama, .ren, .eus and .рус all have new gTLD contracts with ICANN as of yesterday.
It’s an eclectic batch of TLDs. Unusually, only one belongs to Donuts.
Of note is .caravan, which on the face of it looks like an English-language generic, but which is actually a closed, single-registrant dot-brand.
While “caravan” is an English dictionary word in the UK and Australasia, in the US it’s a 50-year-old trademark belonging to Illinois-based applicant Caravan International.
The Governmental Advisory Committee never flagged up .caravan as a “closed generic” in its Beijing Communique, so ICANN never questioned how it would be used.
However, the application states that the company plans “to reserve all names within the TLD to itself”.
What we seem to have here is a case of a dictionary word in one part of the world being captured by a single-registrant applicant due to a trademark elsewhere.
Another notable new Registry Agreement signatory is Punto 2012, which has obtained a contract for .bar.
The gTLD was originally contested, but Demand Media’s United TLD withdrew following an RFP held by the government of Montenegro, which had an effective veto over the string “Bar” due to a match with the protected name of one of its administrative regions.
I gather Montenegro will be paid in some way from the .bar registry pot.
There are also a few new geographic/cultural registries this week: .eus for the Basque people of Spain, .yokohama for a Japanese city, .saarland for a German state and the Cyrillic IDN .рус for a subset of the Russian people.
The only .brand is .ren, for the Chinese social network Renren.
The remainder are English-language generics.
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Absolutely NOONE of any mental aptitude is going to want ANY of these stupid TLD’s.
Give me a break. Major FAIL!
The .com portfolio owners keep balking at the wrong tree. Domain industry blogs are not where premium domain real estate buyers are.
The essential question is “where are premium domain real estate buyers concentrated enough that they can be advertised to economically?” 1&1 paid about $20 per lead during their football commercials (Berkens). Not per sale, per lead. Nobody has yet explained how that could work for them, or shown an alternative.
The city TLDs have an edge, and a few topics where there are existing groups (.horse?), but for many TLDs, domain blogs may actually be their most concentrated market.
Do you mean domainers selling to other domainers ? This shouldn’t be a primary goal…
Stupendous FAILS — every .stupid one of them!
http://www.threecrowns.pub – what’s stupid about that?
How many pubs are there in the world?
I’m a long time computer first time designer & I’m really really hoping they will get .fish out on the market. The area I’m in has a lot of websites that are already established fishing guides with all of the pertinent .com’s already taken. I’m hoping a .fish will get us a couple extra clicks in our new guiding business. So there is at least one small business that will hopefully benefit from the new ICANN domains. No one has come out with pricing yet, so I’m crossing my fingers on that. I’m on a very strict budget; like had to learn to design on notepad without a wifi connection budget. I’m hopeful that I’m the type of target market they had in mind when they came out with the new domains instead of domain speculators. I also hope they hurry up, what kind of a date is “early 2014” anyway?