Six more gTLDs shown the door, five may be auctioned
There are to be six fewer gTLDs on the internet, after ICANN terminated its registry contracts with two companies.
Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have been cancelled, after a lengthy compliance process, while Kerry Trading Co self-terminated .kerrylogistics.
Despite being contracted for a decade, none of AGIT’s TLDs had ever meaningfully launched. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of registrations.
The registry had stopped paying CoCCA, its back-end provider, bringing it into serious breach of its Registry Agreements. It had also failed to pay its ICANN fees.
According to ICANN correspondence, after it entered into mediation with AGIT last August it came up with a secret term sheet to give the company a way out, but it breached the terms of that deal too.
All five were terminated over the Christmas period, but they could return if ICANN decides to sell them off to the highest bidder.
ICANN told the company it “will conduct an assessment and make its determination whether to transition operation of the .nowruz gTLD to a successor registry operator.”
But they all look like poison chalices. They’re all related in some way to Iran, and could raise cultural or legal sensitivities.
.shia is related to the branch of Islam, .pars is related to the language and culture of Iran and .nowruz is the Persian new year holiday.
.tci, which I can easily imagine being picked up and repurposed by a discount-names portfolio registry, was supposed to be a dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran and همراه. is the brand of its mobile phone subsidiary, meaning something like “companion”.
Neither was technically a Spec 13 dot-brand, which is usually enough to for ICANN to rule out a redelegation.
But even if ICANN decides to sell off these five dead strings to another registry under the Registry Transition Process, there’s no guarantee that will ever actually happen.
Org decided to auction failed gTLD .wed almost five years ago and there’s been no movement on that ever since. Failed .desi is in a similar situation.
.kerrylogistics was a Spec 13, and will not be transitioned, after Hong Kong based delivery company Kerry unilaterally told ICANN it no longer wished to run the TLD.
Kerry has five remaining dot-brands, including .kerryhotels and .kerryproperties, that it does not use but does not seem to want to kill off just yet.
If you find this post or this blog useful or interestjng, please support Domain Incite, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.
Kerry Logistics is also one of two TLDs that changed string due to s*-up. They applied to .kerrylogisitics and ICANN accepted the string change.
The other one was .dotafrica (dot dot africa).