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Another bundle of joy for XYZ as Johnson & Johnson throws out the .baby

Kevin Murphy, December 18, 2018, 14:40:08 (UTC), Domain Services

XYZ.com seems to have acquired the .baby gTLD from Johnson & Johnson.

ICANN records show that the .baby registry contract was assigned to the growing portfolio registry November 19.

The news, which has yet to be announced by buyer or seller, arrives four years after J&J paid $3,088,888 for .baby at an ICANN last-resort auction, beating off five other applicants.

.baby is not what you’d call a roaring success. It has about 600 domains under management after almost two years of general availability.

It typically retails for about $80.

While the plan for .baby was to keep it quite tightly controlled, with J&J giving itself broad rights to refuse registration of any domain that did not appear to fit within its family-friendly mission, it does not seem that regime was strictly enforced.

Explain realdonaldtrump.baby

I would expect XYZ, with its come-all attitude to domains, to be even more relaxed about the namespace.

IANA records show that the gTLD under J&J was (and still is) managed by FairWinds, with a Neustar back-end. Neither are typical partners for XYZ, which tends to use CentralNic.

I think this makes it 12 gTLDs for the XYZ stable, including those it runs in partnership. It has 10 listed on its web site and it picked up former dot-brand .monster from Monster.com a couple months back.

J&J also owns the dot-brand .jnj, which has about 100 domains in its zone but no publicly facing web sites to speak of.

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Comments (5)

  1. That’s what you call an abortion. 🙂

  2. Robin says:

    Read about this from Ricksblog. That’s the problem when some corporate head honchos had too much budget to throw. Might as well spend the $ 3 M in helping others. Good waste J&J.

    • Snoopy says:

      I don’t think many predicted how little impact the ntlds would have. These extensions are basket cases, xyz may make an ROI but it is like selling dented cans of beans. Has some value but it is now seen as a fringe area of the domain industry rather than a mainstream competitor.
      Johnson and Johnson now have a nice tax loss they can claim. .jnj will be the next drop.

  3. Rubens Kuhl says:

    They apply for .asbestosfreetalc in the next round.

Leave a Reply to Robin