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Another VW car dot-brand crashes out
Kevin Murphy,
February 18, 2025, 16:08:22 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Volkswagen’s patchy commitment to dot-brand gTLDs is in evidence again this week, as the company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .bentley.
Bentley is one of VW’s luxury car brands, based in the UK. It’s exercised its option to unilaterally terminate its gTLD registry agreement, with no explanation given.
The gTLD had a single resolving domain, which redirected to a .com.
It’s the first dot-brand to terminate this year, thought the notice seems to have been filed with ICANN in December.
VW’s attitude to its original portfolio of dot-brands has been all over the place.
Its .volkswagen, which one might expect to be the flagship, was terminated four years ago, along with its Chinese version, but .seat and .audi each have thousands of active registrations.
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.seat and .audi are obviously successful. Bentley being for another type of consumer, the recipes that worked for .seat and .audi probably didn’t work for .bentley. Volkswagen would have probably applied for .vw if 2-letter strings had been allowed, but they had to choose .volkswagen instead, which is a bit long to use as a TLD, thus they eventually terminated it.