Huge telco dumps gTLDs after rebrand

e&, a major telecoms company in the Middle East, has told ICANN to scrap its two dot-brand gTLDs following a partial corporate rebrand last year.

The Abu Dhabi-based company, which operates in 16 countries and has turnover of over $7 billion, said it no longer wishes to operate .etisalat and its Arabic equivalent, اتصالات. (.xn--mgbaakc7dvf). It’s never used the domains.

The company last year said it was rebranding as e&, the ampersand perhaps demonstrating that its marketing folk have little interest in intuitive domain names. “Etisalat by e&” is still used in some territories.

The firm uses eand.com as its primary web site domain.

As dot-brands with no domains and no customers, ICANN will quietly drop them from the root in due course.

No $8 million discount for dot-brands, says ICANN

ICANN has rejected a request for a 80% discount on registry fees paid by dot-brand gTLD operators.

The Brand Registry Group had asked ICANN in May for a reduction in the annual fixed fee from $25,000 to $5,000, largely on the basis that they have essentially no abuse and require very little Compliance oversight.

But interim CEO Sally Costerton has now responded to “respectfully decline” the request, which would have wiped out about $8 million of ICANN’s annual budget, about 5% of its total revenue.

“The cost to support New gTLDs is not merely based on the number of domains under management or the level of abuse. Regardless of the size of the TLD, registry operators must still comply with the Registry Agreement and associated policies, and ICANN must monitor that compliance,” Costerton wrote.

Dot-brands already have lower fees because they uniformly don’t pass the 50,000 domains limit at which transactional fees kick in, she said.

There are mechanisms in the Base Registry Agreement that all amendments to be made, she said.

Three more dot-brands realize the futility of existence

A big bank and a big retailer have ditched their dot-brand gTLDs.

Northwestern Mutual has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .mutual and .northwesternmutual, while iconic jewelry store operator Tiffany said it doesn’t want .tiffany any more.

Neither gTLD has been used. The Northwestern registry pages contain a notice, apparently from 2017, about how it expected to publish launch plans “over the coming months”.

Northwestern’s gTLDs are on GoDaddy’s back-end. Tiffany is on Verisign. All three were managed by Fairwinds Partners.

.food registry to dump four dot-brand gTLDs

A company controlled by Warner Bros Discovery is dumping four of its dot-brand gTLDs, but keeping hold of .food, which it has been sitting on, unused for the better part of eight years.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .foodnetwork, .travelchannel, .hgtv and .cookingnetwork, which are four of its US cable TV channels.

Unusually, the termination notice contains a bit of color explaining its decision:

Despite efforts over the years to develop a marketing strategy for deployment of these assets, the company has determined there is not a current use for them and therefore requests early termination of the ICANN Registry Agreements and to wind down these assets

The gTLDs have never been used, something that can also be said for the remainder of Lifestyle’s original portfolio of 11 gTLDs.

The registry was originally owned by Scripps Networks, but following a series of M&A since last year it’s been majority owned by media giant Warner Bros Discovery.

It also has current contracts for .food, .diy, .cityeats, .living, .frontdoor, .lifestyle, and the mysterious .vana (presumably a brand that Scripps was planning to launch in 2012 that never materialized).

The registry’s back-end was Verisign and its new gTLD consultant was Jennifer Wolfe.

Ferrari survives carmaker’s dot-brand bloodbath

Fiat Chrysler is to kill off five of its six dot-brand gTLDs, which it has never used.

The company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .abarth, .alfaromeo, .fiat, .maserati, and .lancia, four of its car brands.

Weirdly, .ferrari, which has also never been used, is not subject to a termination notice. Perhaps the company has plans for it.

The gTLDs were all managed by CSC on the Identity Digital (Afilias) back-end.

The news comes about a year after Volkswagen killed off some of its gTLDs. Audi and Seat are some of the most enthusiastic users of dot-brands.

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.