ICANN to terminate Guardian’s last gTLD
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Applications for .gdn and .guardianmedia were withdrawn before Initial Evaluation had even finished.
Interesting, so they went from 3 new gTLD’s to none. From what I recall, all the application fee’s were non-refundable. That’s a huge chunk of money lost. It baffles me that they were not able to get .TheGuardian live within the 12-month requirement to keep it. Seems like such a waste of company funds.
The application fees are partially refundable, depending on when you drop out.
Length must surely be a factor, don’t you think? Not the only consideration, of course. But newspaper names tend to be unwieldy.
.BBC would seem the path of least resistance. Easier for consumers to embrace than .THEGUARDIAN or .OBSERVER.
That’s why we are holding a One Day neutral Conference on the 1st of December with .brands and other Domain name Industry experts, to advance in this huge sector with opportunities.
@Dietmar Stefitz,
Good luck!
brandsand.domains conference looks really a promising conference !