Today’s new gTLD passes, signings and withdrawals
ICANN signed 21 new gTLD registry contracts late last week, while one applicant has withdrawn and another has passed evaluation.
First, Donuts has pulled out of its two-way contest for .global, leaving the path clear for CloudNames to be awarded the gTLD, which is to be an open-registration generic.
I gather that the contention set was settled in a rare example of a privately negotiated deal, rather than an auction, involving Donuts.
On Thursday, several applicants signed Registry Agreements with ICANN.
Famous Four Media, which applied for 60 strings, signed its first RA, for .bid.
Fellow portfolio applicant Top Level Domain Holdings signed for .miami, .country, .work, .vodka and .rodeo; Donuts got .supplies, .supply and .商店 (“shop”) and Top Level Spectrum got .feedback.
PeopleBrowsr contracted for .best and .kred and Punto 2012 got .rest (for “restaurant” and its many non-English variants).
In dot-brands, World Trade Centers Association got .wtc, Sohu.com got .sohu, Frogans got .frogans, AXA got .axa and Brazilian media conglomerate Globo got .globo.
In geographic strings, PointQuebec got .quebec, while FAITID got .moscow and its Cyrllic IDN equivalent .москва.
Finally, on Friday ICANN passed Bosch Rexroth’s dot-brand application for .rexroth through Extended Evaluation.
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Thank you for this article. I’d just like to point out a small error and take this opportunity to clear up a common misconception regarding the presentation of the .frogans TLD. Firstly, the applicant in this case is not Frogans but the OP3FT (Organization for the Protection, Promotion and Progress of the Frogans Technology), a French non-profit dedicated to the implementation of the Frogans layer on the Internet. Secondly, .frogans is not strictly speaking a ‘dot-brand’ gTLD (even though it has been classified as such on resources such as the ICANN Wiki). It would be more accurate to describe it as a ‘network’ or ‘infrastructural’ gTLD since its main function will be to address the computers that are dedicated to the functioning of the Frogans layer (just as the .net was originally intended for the naming of network node computers). See our recent announcement in this regard: https://lists.frogans.org/archives/announcement/2013-12/msg00003.html.