ICANN loses another dot-brand, this one in use
Linde, a German chemicals company, has asked ICANN to terminate its gTLD registry contract.
Unusually, the dot-brand was actually in use, with many .linde domains still in its zone file, many of which were indexed by search engines.
It seems the company was using two-letter country-specific domains such as cz.linde and feature-oriented names such as socialmedia.linde to redirect to pages on linde.com or even the godawful the-linde-group.com.
But whatever Linde was trying, it didn’t live up to expectations, so .linde is set to be added to the funeral pyre of 100+ dead dot-brands.
Macy’s scraps .macys gTLD
US retailer Macy’s has dumped its dot-brand gTLD .macys.
The company told ICANN recently that it no longer wishes to hold a registry contract, noting that it never used the gTLD.
ICANN last week agreed that as a dot-brand with no third-party users, the domain will not be redelegated to another registry.
It’s the seventh gTLD to scrap its contract this year, lower than ICANN’s budget estimates.
CentralNic passes on abandoned dot-brand
CentralNic has sold on the dead dot-brand it acquired last year, to a company run by Sav.com’s CEO.
.case was originally owned by CNH Industrial, a large maker of industrial machinery, but it was sold off to CentralNic subsidiary Helium last year when the company dumped its portfolio of unwanted dot-brands.
I speculated at the time that it was acquired merely to be sold — Helium previously acted as an interregnum operators of .fans, and that turned out to be correct. CentralNic did nothing with it — the NIC page still shows images of diggers — and it has no registered domains.
The new owner is a company called Digity, whose president is Sav.com CEO Anthos Chrysanthou.
Now Nokia scraps a dot-brand
Finnish tech company Nokia has become the latest company to get rid of a dot-brand gTLD.
It’s asked ICANN to terminate the contract for the IDN .诺基亚 ( .xn--jlq61u9w7b), which is the Chinese transliteration of “Nokia”.
Like .nokia itself, the TLD is not currently in use. Nokia has not asked ICANN to terminate .nokia (or, at least, ICANN has not published such a notice).
Other companies that chose to terminate their Chinese IDNs include Richemont and Volkswagen. In Richemont’s case it was followed by all its other gTLDs.
Bugatti dumps dot-brand under new owners
Bugatti, which makes incredibly expensive limited-edition sports cars, is dropping its dot-brand.
The French company asked ICANN to release it from its .bugatti registry contract about a month ago, according to ICANN documents.
Bugatti entered new ownership last November, under a joint venture between Rimac and Porsche, and recently reportedly underwent a branding overhaul.
It seems the dot-brand had no place under the new marketing strategy.
Its previous owner had been Volkswagen, which still has a (unused) dot-brand, despite dumping its Chinese-script equivalent. But Porsche had been an opponent of the new gTLD program back in 2011.
.bugatti had actually been used, albeit lightly. A couple of live, non-redirecting sites still remain.
Over 100 dot-brands have terminated their contracts to date.
Early “dot-brand” adopter wants to scrap its gTLD
One of the first adopters of the dot-brand gTLD concept, which has an active portfolio of resolving domains, has asked ICANN to tear up its registry contract.
The Australian Cancer Research Foundation said it no longer wishes to operate .cancerresearch, which it has used since 2014.
It’s a bit of a strange, possibly unique, situation, which may explain why its termination request, submitted in April, is only now being published by ICANN.
Technically, .cancerresearch was more like a closed generic than a dot-brand. It did not have a trademark on the string or the Specification 13 exceptions in its registry contract, which would make it a dot-brand.
Instead, ACRF had the TLD delegated, registered a bunch of resolving names to itself, and never officially launched. There was never even a sunrise period.
Pretty significant loophole in the rules for the 2012 application round if you ask me.
But ICANN is treating .cancerresearch as if it was a dot-brand anyway. Because nobody except ACRF ever owned any domains there, there’s no need to transition to a new registry to protect registrants.
This also means nobody else will be able to apply for the same string for two years, assuming an application window opens in that period.
ACRF still has live non-redirecting web sites on domains such as lung.cancerresearch, breast.cancerresearch and donate.cancerresearch.
It’s the first gTLD termination request since last October.
Amazon governments not playing ball with Amazon’s .amazon
Governments in South America are refusing to play nicely with Amazon over its controversial .amazon dot-brand.
Speaking at ICANN 74 in The Hague this morning, Brazil’s representative on the Governmental Advisory Committee said that ICANN’s decision to delegate .amazon to the retail giant a couple of years ago contravenes the multi-stakeholder process and is “incompatible with the expectations and sovereign rights of the Amazon peoples”.
Luciano Mazza de Andrade said that the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which is membered by the eight governments of the Amazonia region, wrote to Amazon in December to decline an offer to reserve a number of .amazon domains.
Amazon’s contract with ICANN contains a Public Interest Commitment that grants ACTO and its members one usable .amazon domain each, and 1,500 blocks overall for culturally sensitive strings.
The company had given ACTO a December 19 deadline to submit its list of strings, but it seems its members do not acknowledge the contract’s validity.
“Among other points it underlined that ACTO member states did not give consent to the process of adjudication of the .amazon top-level domain and that they did not consider themselves bound by said decision or the conditions attached to it including the above mentioned Public Interest Commitment,” Brazil’s rep said.
He added that “the adjudication of the top-level domain to a private company without our approval and authorization does not respect the applicable rules, expressly contravenes the multistakeholder nature of ICANN’s decision-making process of interest, and is incompatible with the expectations and sovereign rights of the Amazon peoples.”
ACTO has previously described the delegation of .amazon as “illegal and unjust”.
Amazon has a handful of live .amazon domains, which redirect to various services on amazon.com.
CentralNic takes over a dead dot-brand
CentralNic has become the latest company to pounce on a dot-brand gTLD that was on its way to the dustbin of history.
The ICANN contract for .case was transferred to a London company called Helium TLDs, a CentralNic subsidiary, last week.
That company was previously called FANS TLD, and was the vehicle CentralNic used to acquire .fans from Asiamix Digital in 2018 before later passing it on to Hong Kong-based ZDNS International.
I believe something similar is happening here.
.case was a dot-brand owned, but never used, by CNH Industrial, which Wikipedia tells me is an American-Dutch-British-Italian company that makes about $28 billion a year making and selling agricultural and construction machinery. Diggers and forklifts and such.
CNH also managed .caseih, .newholland, and .iveco for some of its other brands, but these contracts were terminated earlier in the year.
The company had also asked ICANN to cancel its .case agreement, but that seems to have attracted acquisitive registry operators, and the termination request was withdrawn as I noted in September.
While terminating a dot-brand can often be seen as a lack of confidence in the dot-brand concept, selling off the gTLD to a third party rules out reapplying for the same string in future and can be seen as an even deeper disdain.
Now, .case is in CentralNic’s hands. I believe it’s the first dot-brand the company has taken over.
Rival registries including Donuts, XYZ and ShortDot have also swept up unwanted dot-brand gTLDs, stripped them of their restrictions, and repurposed them as general-purpose or niche spaces.
CSC (not that one) scraps its dot-brand
A company formerly known as CSC has terminated its dot-brand gTLD contract four years after discontinuing the company name.
Computer Sciences Corporation, now known as DXC Technology, has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .csc, saying:
This gTLD was secured right before the merger of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services merged to form DXC Technology. Consequently, the gTLD has never been used and shutting it down will have no effect on internal or external stakeholders.
The CSC-HP merger and name changed happened in 2017.
At one point, nic.csc bore a notice saying it was the “registry for the .dxc top-level domain”, which was a cool trick given .dxc doesn’t exist and has never existed.
This CSC is different from the corporate registrar of the same abbreviation, where the CSC stands for Corporation Service Company. There’s a reasonable chance that this CSC will be able to apply for .csc in the next application round.
Hold on to your stats! ShortDot gets two gTLDs approved in China
ShortDot, which makes a business repurposing unwanted gTLDs for the budget end of the market, said today it has had two more horses in its stable approved for use in China.
The company said that .bond and .cyou have been given the necessary nods by Chinese authorities.
What this could mean, if history is any guide, is a sharp increase in sales for the two extensions, possibly to the extent that they materially affect overall domain industry volume stats for the next few years.
ShortDot seems to think so, saying in a press release: “Given the massive success of .icu in China, it is quite clear that .bond and .cyou will follow suit to become largely successful.”
.icu currently has about 600,000 names under management, more than half of which are registered via Chinese registrars. Its numbers are on their way down.
At its peak 18 months ago it had more than 10 times as many, about 6.6 million, due to its low pricing and popularity among Chinese speculators.
The sudden rise and wholly predictable precipitous fall of .icu has been messing with overall new gTLD industry stats for the last couple of years. No volume analysis is complete without a .icu-related asterisk.
It’s by no means assured that the same will be true of .cyou and .bond of course.
.cyou, which was originally a dot-brand matching the ticker symbol of a Chinese company, had 118,000 names under management at the end of May and 136,000 in its zone file yesterday.
Names in .cyou can be had for $2 at Namecheap and NameSilo, its top two registrars, which together hold over 70% of the market.
.bond, originally an Australian university’s dot-brand, has fewer than 5,000 names at the last count and retails for about $55 retail at the low end.
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