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Helsinki throws in the towel on city gTLD
Kevin Murphy,
September 3, 2026, 08:52:08 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Helsinki has become the third of the world’s capital cities to decide that it doesn’t want to run its city gTLD after all.
The City of Helsinki has notified ICANN that it wants to terminate its registry contract for .helsinki, which it had experimented with but never fully embraced with gusto.
Curiously, the termination notice was filed in May, but the city specifically requested that ICANN not end the contract before the August 12 cut-off date for new gTLD applications.
Presumably, Helsinki was keen that nobody else applied for .helsinki in the current round — if it was still in the DNS root zone, an applicant would have to be mad to apply for it.
Helsinki becomes the third capital, after Budapest and Doha, to terminate their city gTLD contract.
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