A dot-brand walks into a bar

“He doesn’t need a VPN, his network works above the DNS. Do you know what the DNS is?”

When he said it, the 80-year-old barfly I found myself in a long conversation with at the weekend had no idea what I do for a living.

He was not a technical guy. Long-retired, his career had been in a completely different field. He was bragging about one of his high-flying relatives’ technical nous and impressive homeworking set-up.

The “above the DNS” stuff was how this set-up had been translated for him by another relative.

I told him I know a thing or two about DNS (two things!) and explained how it works and why what he just said didn’t make much sense to me. I told him about the root, Verisign, .com, ICANN, and so on.

“He doesn’t need any of that stuff,” he reiterated. “His network works above the DNS.”

About 10 minutes of head-scratching later, the penny finally dropped. Dude was talking about a dot-brand. Like working on a corporate network running a dot-brand was somehow escaping the DNS altogether.

As soon as I had that epiphany, and because I already knew what industry the relative worked in, and which country he came from, I was able to, from my knowledge of the root zone, correctly identify his employer.

I felt pretty smug about that, truth be told.

While a lot of dot-brands obtained in 2012 still remain dormant, some are in use, even if only or primarily internally, and it turns out some have their enthusiastic — proud, even — advocates in random bars at the ass-end of nowhere.

It’s only anecdotal evidence, but if even non-techie retirees in small-town ex-pat bars kinda know what dot-brands are and why they are useful, even if some of the technical details escape them, I wonder whether the concept is approaching mainstream.

.goo terminated as search engine closes down

The .goo gTLD is among a pair of dot-brand gTLDs to recently self-terminate.

goo was a 1990s-style search portal focused on the Japanese market and owned by local incumbent telco NTT. It eventually lost relevance and finally closed down for good at short notice last November.

Despite the similar branding, goo was unrelated to Google and in fact predated Google’s foundation by about a year, according to some accounts. It eventually turned to Google to power its search functionality.

NTT has asked ICANN to terminate its .goo registry contract and ICANN has given it the nod.

There was one active .goo domain, www.goo, which redirected to goo.ne.jp, its primary domain.

Joining .goo in self-termination is .wolterskluwer, one of those gTLDs that really makes me scratch my head for having never noticed its existence despite my daily exposure to vast amounts of gTLD data.

It’s owned by Wolters Kluwer, a large Dutch company that provides software for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unlike goo, the company appears to be in robust health but it never used its gTLD.

Salesforce to apply for a dot-brand

Salesforce has become the most significant company to date to announce it plans to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD.

Specifically, the company plans to apply for a dot-brand, according to a disclosure made by David Lawrence, software engineering architect at Salesforce and IETF liaison on ICANN’s board of directors.

The disclosure came when the board approved the new gTLD program’s latest Applicant Guidebook at the conclusion of the ICANN 84 public meeting in Dublin last month.

While the IETF liaison is a non-voting role, he nevertheless recused himself from the AGB discussion, saying: “I work for an employer to apply for a brand TLD.”

While there are dozens of companies and organizations with public plans for new gTLDs, most of them are little-known brands associated with the blockchain space.

By contrast, Salesforce is, according to Wikipedia, the 61st-largest company in the world, with a market cap of $238 billion.

Two more dot-brands leave Verisign for GoDaddy

Verisign’s ongoing shedding of its registry back-end services clients continued recently, with two dot-brands moving to GoDaddy Registry.

The two gTLDs are .norton, the anti-virus brand which now belongs to Gen Digital, and .capitalone, the dot-brand for the financial services firm Capital One. Both recently updated their IANA records to show GoDaddy is now the technical contact.

The loss of .norton is perhaps notable because of Verisign’s shared history with the brand. Verisign allowed Symantec, then-owner of the Norton brand, to use the Verisign brand to sell SSL certificates for a few years following a $1.3 billion deal in 2010.

But Verisign has spent the last few years deliberately unloading its registry services clients onto its competitors. Other beneficiaries of this wind-down have included Identity Digital and Nominet.

Goodyear tires of its dot-brand

For the record, I’m not proud of that headline. It doesn’t even work in British English. But if I hadn’t done it, some of you would have complained, and I want you to be happy.

Rubber company Goodyear has become the latest new gTLD registry operator to tell ICANN to terminate a dot-brand.

In this case, it’s not the company’s primary, .goodyear, but rather .dunlop, the brand of one of its tire-making subsidiaries.

The company did not give ICANN a reason for the self-termination; the Dunlop brand appears to be alive and well.

Neither .goodyear nor .dunlop have any registered domains. Dunlop and Goodyear both use .eu and .com domains for their primary web sites.

Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted

A Chinese clothing company has asked ICANN to delete its dot-brand gTLD, despite the fact that it is being used for web sites and email.

Redstone Haute Couture wants rid of .redstone, which has been in active use for almost a decade.

My database shows that it has about a dozen names, most registered in 2016 and most of which resolve, not redirect, to web sites.

Several have MX records, suggesting they are or were being used for email too.

No reason was given for Redstone’s request. The brand itself doesn’t seem have been retired, though the company is perhaps better known for its product lines such as Giada and Curiel.

The company was using ZDNS as its back-end registry services provider.

Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio

Financial services company Prudential Financial has dumped one of its three dot-brand gTLDs, which it was not using.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its contract to run .pramerica, which, despite the name, provides investment services to the Indian market. The subsidiary uses a .in domain for its web site.

While .pramerica has never had a registered domain in the eight years it’s been active, Prudential has two other gTLDs — .pru and .prudential — which are in active use.

Neither is used as the primary domains for their respective brands — both use exact-match .com names — but both have live corporate sites under domains such as pr.pru and stock.pru.

Prudential’s gTLDs all run on GoDaddy’s back-end registry.

Lancaster bags up its dot-brand

A French leather goods company is trashing its lightly-used dot-brand gTLD.

Lancaster has told ICANN that it wants to terminate its Registry Agreement for .lancaster.

The company added half a dozen names to the gTLD in 2016 — things like bag.lancaster and fashion.lancaster — but they always just redirected to its primary web site at lancaster.com.

Lancaster used AFNIC as its back-end registry services provider.

The string “Lancaster” has many uses, from other brands to geographic locations, so it’s not impossible .lancaster might return in another guise in a future new gTLD application round.

Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba is throwing its weight behind its dot-brand gTLD, .toshiba.

The company announced today that from next month it will start to migrate all of its employees to @mail.toshiba email addresses, starting with group parent Toshiba Corp, which currently uses @toshiba.co.jp.

For an unspecified period, mail sent to the current .jp addresses will auto-forward to .toshiba, but this backwards compatibility will be turned off eventually, the company said.

Toshiba said the switch will “prevent unauthorized use of email addresses by phishing emails impersonating people in Toshiba Group and reduce security risks”. This is often pitched as a key benefit of dot-brands.

The company has been using global.toshiba as its primary web site domain for a few years already. It maintains other localized domains in ccTLDs and .com as well.

Apart from global.toshiba and mail.toshiba, .toshiba has no other functioning dot-brand domains.

Another VW car dot-brand crashes out

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.