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Who uses Sunrise nowadays? You might be surprised

Kevin Murphy, September 23, 2024, Domain Registries

Sunrise periods may have been one of the unexpectedly damp squibs of the new gTLD program, but each launching registry is still obliged to run them and they usually attract a hundred or so registrations, some quite surprising.

Amazon’s sunrise periods for .deal and .now closed yesterday, ending with about 160 domains in each, so I thought I’d have a trawl through each zone file to see who’s mad-keen on protecting their trademarks online nowadays.

Excluding registered variants (with and without hyphens, for example), brands under the control of a single parent company, and domains registered to Amazon itself, I’d say there were fewer than 100 actual registrants in each sunrise.

With that in mind, you might expect only the most valuable, most at-risk brands to have participated.

Big tech firms — Meta, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, AOL, Baidu, etc — which are particularly at risk of phishing attacks, have indeed all snapped up names matching some of their famous marks.

Brands that might have a higher risk of counterfeiting, such as fashion and beauty brands like Maison Margiela, L’Occitane, Patagonia, Richard Mille, and Rolex all make an appearance in the zones.

But there are plenty of sunrise registrants whose appearance got me scratching my head.

Perhaps the weirdest registrant is SuperSigns, a sign-maker that appears to operate out of a single location, the size of a typical convenience store, between a Toyota dealership and a Dunkin’ Donuts on a small strip mall in Arizona.

La Famiglia Rana is a brand of ready-made supermarket pasta products that has registered at least three domains in each gTLD during sunrise.

Mars didn’t register mars.now or mars.deal, but its subsidiary did register championpetfoods.now.

CooperVision makes contact lenses and it registered both of its exact matches.

Delsey makes luggage. Danfoss makes electrical components. Nedgia distributes natural gas in Spain. Lechuza makes self-watering plant pots. Invisalign makes dental braces. They all participated in sunrise.

And we all know how mad the Americans are for the sport of polo, which is perhaps why The United States Polo Association chose to snap up uspoloassn.deal before somebody else did.

It’s certainly an eclectic mix, with no readily apparent common theme, but each registrant presumably has its own good reason for buying sunrise matches, even if that reason was simply telling its registrar: “Register everything!”

.now and .deal enter their Early Access Period of general availability today and go to standard pricing at the end of the month.

Amazon to launch two new gTLDs this month

Kevin Murphy, August 1, 2024, Domain Registries

Amazon Registry is to finally launch two of the gTLDs it has been sitting on for the best part of a decade.

The company expects to take .deal and .now to sunrise later this month, with general availability following in September.

According to information provided by ICANN, sunrise for both runs for a month from August 22, followed immediately by a week-long Early Access Period and general availability at standard pricing September 30.

Both extensions have been in the root since 2016, parts of Amazon’s portfolio of 54 mostly unused gTLDs.

They’re the first English-language strings the company has launched since .bot, which came out with a controlled release in 2018 before loosening its restrictions last year. It has about 14,000 domains.

Similar TLDs to .deal and .now are already available from other registries, which may give clues to their potential.

The plural .deals is part of Identity Digital’s massive portfolio, selling at a $25 wholesale price, but it currently has fewer than 10,000 registrations, having peaked at 11,388 in May 2022.

.now might be the more attractive of the two. The disputed ccTLD for Niue, .nu, means “now” in Swedish and has about 220,000 domains under management.