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.

Defensive dot-brands are renewing, making ICANN millions

Companies that have not used their dot-brand gTLDs in a decade are nevertheless renewing their registry contracts with ICANN, leading to a situation where even ICANN seems to be benefiting directly from defensive registrations.

In just the last month or so, the registries behind .delta, .cipriani, .gallup, .icbc, .frontier, .alibaba, .taobao and others have renewed their Registry Agreements for a second 10-year term, despite having never registered a single second-level domain name.

Far more dormant dot-brands have renewed their contracts this year than have voluntarily terminated them.

According to my database, there are 116 dot-brand gTLDs today that have only ever registered their obligatory nic.[brand] domain and nothing else. That’s from a total of 369 dot-brands still live in the DNS.

Given that the absolute minimum a registry has to pay ICANN is its $25,000 annual registry fee — rising to $25,800 on January 1 — it looks like ICANN is making about $3 million per year, a couple of percent of its annual budget, from defensive dot-brands.

Registrar and back-end registry services partners are of course also making revenue from these unused brand gTLDs, but the terms of those contracts are typically not public.

There are any number of reasons why dormant dot-brands may renew their RAs. They may still be playing wait-and-see, they may be spooked by the looming 2026 application round, or they may just have an aggressive BLOCK EVERYTHING brand management strategy.

A dot-brand that was actually used is shutting down

It’s been a slow year for self-terminating dot-brand gTLDs, but today we’ve seen our third.

Lipsy, a UK-based women’s fashion retail brand owned by Next, has told ICANN it wants to end its Registry Agreement for .lipsy, which it has operated since 2016.

What’s unusual about this termination is that Lipsy actually had quite a lot of registered domains — at least 133 over the years, of which 132 were still active a month ago.

My records show that all of its domains apart from the registry home page were deleted October 22, the day before the company sent its termination notice to ICANN.

The domains were generally product keywords which pretty much all redirected to next.co.uk or nextdirect.com; Lipsy’s own web site had also redirected to Next’s since 2018.

Almost all of its domains were registered between December 2020 and July 2022. It hasn’t registered any since.

.lipsy was on Verisign’s back-end until May 2023, when it switched to Identity Digital.

Straggler gTLD signs first ICANN contract for years

One of the outstanding contested gTLDs from the 2012 application round looks set to be delegated finally, after the winning bidder signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

Merck Registry Holdings Inc is now the officially contracted registry for .merck, and it appears the intent is to be a dot-brand jointly controlled by two unaffiliated chemical companies of the same name.

An American company and a German company, both called Merck and with common roots that were severed during World War I, now seem set to have equal ownership rights to .merck, after over a decade of legal wrangling.

Both companies applied for .merck, and according to the ICANN process the American one won because the German one withdrew its application.

However, the winning application was amended in 2021 to say that the registry intends to transfer its contract to a newly formed UK company called MM Domain Holdco Ltd.

Company records indicate that this shell firm is a 50:50 joint venture of the two Mercks, with over a million dollars cash in the bank.

It seems that the two firms intend to share the gTLD, and run it as a dot-brand for both of their benefit, which is pretty rare.

AI and games among July’s interesting dot-brand domains

A domain hosting a fun little video game for Lidl staff was the highlight dot-brand domain registration in July.

There were 210 registrations in dot-brands in July 2024, spread across 34 individual TLDs. As usual, the largest registrant was German financial services firm Deutsche Vermögensberatung, which gives .dvag domains to its agents, with 90 new regs.

Just like in the non-brand space, not all dot-brand regs immediately resolve publicly. Some never will. Others, technical indicators show, are only designed for private corporate purposes.

These are the new domains that caught my eye in July.

levelup.lidl (also level-up.lidl) — These domains leads to a surprisingly polished, cutesy-cutesy browser game where the player, presumably a new hire at the German supermarket giant, controls a cartoon potato (?) character as they wander around a 3D landscape interacting with other characters to learn about Lidl’s corporate values. Okay, I admit I only gave it five minutes, but it surely beats a PowerPoint.

gemini.google — Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot. The brand has been around since last December, but it took until July for the matching .google domain to be registered. It currently resolves to gemini.google.com, the official Gemini site. Google also registered another of its brands, fitbit.google, in the month, but it does not currently publicly resolve.

sustainability.bostik (and 27 others) — Adhesives maker Bostik registered 28 .bostik domains in July, all related to product categories (paper.bostik, tape.bostik), customer verticals (transportation.bostik, construction.bostik) or corporate purposes (history.bostik, careers.bostik). The company only has 36 active .bostik domains, registering none for over a year, so the new regs suggest a possible rethink of the dot-brand, even though the domains don’t yet publicly resolve.

escapegames.bnpparibas — Why would BNP Paribas, a large French bank, be interested in “escape games”? Is it planning on locking people in its massive safes? The domain doesn’t currently resolve, so I couldn’t tell you.

sellersinyourcommunity.amazon (and variants) — Amazon also registered the likes of sellersofthecommunity.amazon and sellersinthecommunity.amazon, but the registration of siyc.amazon suggests “Sellers In Your Community” is to be the correct brand for whatever localized e-commerce initiative the online retailer has in mind.

Eight interesting recent dot-brand registrations

If somebody told me that this blog spends altogether too much time shitting on dot-brand gTLDs, I probably wouldn’t argue with them very long or hard before conceding they probably have a point.

So I thought it might be useful, in the interests of balance, to occasionally (perhaps monthly) highlight some of the more interesting dot-brand registrations I’ve spotted recently.

There’s usually plenty to choose from — 34 dot-brand registries registered a total of 135 domains in June, many of which already resolve to live web sites, and there have been over 25,000 registrations to date — so these picks are purely subjective.

lra.amazon

LRA could stand for a great many things, but one of those things is Labour Relations Agency, which raises an eyebrow given that Amazon is currently fighting its warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize in the UK. Right now, it doesn’t resolve for me.

showthemyourpride.itv

I’ve seen this one promoted on the actual television here in the UK! It’s a campaign by broadcaster ITV, fronted by comedian Alan Carr, to get people to make gay people’s lives a little easier by calling out homophobia and such. It was registered June 27, when Pride Month was pretty much over.

go.volvo

The domain only leads to a 404 right now, but it’s notable because it’s Volvo’s first registered .volvo domain and the name is suggestive of some kind of planned portal site or redirect function. Fifty other dot-brands already have go.brand domains registered. Car brands have had a mixed history in the dot-brand space — some have enthusiastically embraced the concept, others have cancelled their registry contracts. In the first category, both .bmw and .mini also received “go.” registrations in June.

listen.afl

.afl is for the Australian Football League, and this domain redirects to a directory of its podcasts on its main .com.au web site.

ca.pioneer

Providing national portals using two-letter country codes at the second level is a fairly popular dot-brand use case, with Germany’s .de the most popular if you exclude strings that are also English words (my, id, it, etc). You might expect ca.pioneer to lead you to a Canadian portal, but it actually takes you to… ahem… usa.pioneer.

admaker.jio

Indian telco JIO is using this domain for a service that makes advertisements, believe it or not. It has about 20 other .jio domains, like stream.jio and translate.jio, that lead, without redirects, to similar hosted apps.

gpt.lundbeck

Registered by the pharma giant back in May, this is the second registered “gpt” in a dot-brand after gpt.fox. Presumably standing for AI buzz-phrase Generative Pre-trained Transformer, I can’t tell you what either site does because they’re password protected. Lundbeck has over 270 .lundbeck domains, most of which resolve.

beam.google

Could this be the eventual brand for Google’s Project Starline videoconferencing technology, which was first announced back in 2021? It certainly seems possible, given that this April-registered domain leads, without a domain redirect, to the Starline web site.