Recent Posts
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Dead dot-brands top 100. Here’s the list and breakdown
The list of dot-brand gTLDs that have had their ICANN registry contracts torn up has now topped 100.
SC Johnson, the big American cleaning products company, has informed the Org it no longer wishes to run .afamilycompany, .duck, .glade, .off, .raid, and .scjohnson.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been keeping a running tally of dot-brand terminations for the last several years, and according to that tally that number is now 101.
But it’s a bit more complex than that, so I thought I’d use the occasion of this milestone to provide a more substantial breakdown.
ICANN has records for 104 dot-brands either being terminated by ICANN or asking to be terminated of their own accord.
The number of registry-initiated termination requests is 90. These are typically gTLDs that were never used, or were experimented with and then abandoned. A smaller number relate to brands that were discontinued following mergers or product end-of-life, rendering the dot-brand pointless.
ICANN initiated the other 14 terminations, mostly because the registry operator got cold feet during the pre-delegation testing phase, before going live, but also in one instance for non-payment of fees and in two cases whatever the hell this is.
Six of the registry-initiated transfer requests were withdrawn before being fully processed. Of those, three (.boots, .mobily, and its Arabic translation) went on to be terminated anyway.
Two registries filed for self-termination then changed their minds and committed auto-genericide by selling their contracts — for .bond and .sbs — to discounting portfolio registry ShortDot instead.
One dot-brand, .case, withdrew its December 2020 termination request and appears to still be active.
Thirteen termination requests are currently in the system but have not yet been fully processed.
Five dot-brand gTLD contracts — .observer, .quest, .monster, .select, .compare — were sold to other registries to be repurposed as open generics. You could add .cyou to that list, depending on how you define a dot-brand.
One gTLD that was originally a generic — .moto — made the move in the other direction to become a dot-brand.
Here’s the list of dot-brands that have either requested a termination, or been terminated.
[table id=67 /]
Even many .Com people thought . Brand would surely work 8 years ago. this was the one area that would be a sure fire success. Apparently it was inevitable that co’s like Google would switch to .Google.
8 years later and what a disaster .Brand has been, every other area of New TLDs have been a complete flop also!
.Com, .Com, .Com!