Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Helsinki throws in the towel on city gTLD

Kevin Murphy, September 3, 2026, 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.

After five-year wait, .madrid domains coming this month

Kevin Murphy, July 5, 2019, Domain Registries

Madrid will become the newest city to get its own gTLD later this month.
The Spanish capital will start accepting sunrise and landrush applications in concurrent priority periods that run from July 16 to October 3.
October 2 marks the five-year anniversary of .madrid being delegated. It’s taken the city a long time to figure out its launch plan.
General availability is due to begin October 10.
The sunrise period includes an option for European trademark owners that are not registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse to obtain names, but with deference to matching TMCH mark holders.
A couple hundred names of local public services have already been tentatively allocated under a pre-sunrise priority period.
.madrid does have local “nexus” eligibility requirements, but it does not appear that you actually need to be located in Madrid, or even in Spain, to obtain a domain.
By my reckoning, the launches of .madrid and .zuerich (which is currently in sunrise and slated to hit GA next April) means MMX’s .budapest is the only 2012-round city-gTLD that has yet to outline its launch plans.

Vienna is the first city with its own TLD

Kevin Murphy, January 3, 2014, Domain Registries

The world’s first city gTLD, .wien, went live on the internet this morning.
It’s the TLD for what the English-speaking world calls Vienna, the Austrian capital.
While its nic.wien starter page doesn’t seem to be resolving yet, .wien itself is in the DNS root zone file.
punkt.wien, the new registry, said in its application that .wien names will be restricted to anyone who “can demonstrate that they have an economic, cultural, historical, social or any other connection” to Vienna.
The same test will apply to the use of .wien names — the registry plans to review the content of sites under the gTLD from time to time to ensure compliance.
The policy appears to be modeled somewhat on the .cat geo-gTLD.
According to the .wien application, about a quarter of the Austrian population lives in its environs, giving the gTLD a market of about 1.7 million people.
The registry is planning to launch properly in March, according to its web site.
While it’s the first city gTLD to go live, it isn’t the first geo to hit the root in this round — that honor belongs to .ruhr, which represents a German state.
(Note: Laos’ ccTLD, .la, is often marketed as a city TLD for Los Angeles, but it’s not quite the same thing.)