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.

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.