.tattoo — another UNR gTLD auction winner emerges
It’s looking rather like Top Level Design has been outed as one of the winners of UNR’s April 2021 gTLD auction.
ICANN records have started to show that the company has taken over the contract for .tattoo, which was one of the 23 contracts UNR said it sold off as it attempted to exit the registry business.
Such a deal would make perfect sense — Top Level Design already runs the complementary TLD .ink, which is a slang term for tattoos.
.tattoo is a much smaller zone, with fewer than 3,000 names under management compared to .ink’s over 45,000.
At this point ICANN has not published the contract reassignment, and IANA still has UNR listed as the sponsor, but the point of contact for the Registry Agreement is now Top Level Design’s Andrew Merriam.
Assuming the assignment completes, that means the new owners of 14 of the 23 gTLDs UNR sold off are known.
XYZ.com bought 10 of them, GoDaddy two, and newcomer Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop.
The handovers have been delayed by ICANN‘s insistence that registries disavow ownership rights to the strings in question, due to UNR bundling rights to blockchain-based alt-root equivalents in its auctions.
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