Identity Digital to launch .watches this month

Identity Digital has announced the launch timetable for its .watches gTLD.

Sunrise will kick off on March 28, running for two months until May 27. This is the period where only registered trademark owners can apply for a name.

The Early Access Program, in which names carry a premium price that decreases every day for a week, will run from May 31 to June 7, immediately after which the gTLD will enter general availability.

Despite the fact that .watches has been live in the DNS since December 2015, there are no registered domains so far.

The original registry was luxury goods maker Richemont, an early proponent of new gTLDs that ultimately lost interest and offloaded its portfolio, including the Chinese version of .watches, over the years.

.watches was sold to Afilias in late 2020, shortly before that company is turn was acquired by Donuts, since rebranded Identity Digital.

Bumper batch of dot-brands off themselves for Friday 13th

It’s Friday 13th tomorrow, and to celebrate the occasion no fewer than 13 dot-brands have opted to take the easy way out and self-terminate.
ICANN has published a bumper list of contracted brand registries that have informed the organization that they no longer wish to run their gTLDs.
Adding themselves to the dot-brand deadpool are: .ladbrokes, .warman, .cartier, .piaget, .chrysler, .dodge, .mopar, .srt, .uconnect, .movistar, .telefonica, .liason and .lancome.
That brings the total of self-terminated new gTLDs to date to 66.
The imminent demise of .cartier and .piaget is perhaps notable, as it means luxury goods maker Richemont has now abandoned ALL of the nine dot-brands it originally applied for.
Richemont, an enthusiastic early adopter of the new gTLD concept, applied for 14 strings in total back in 2012.
The only ones it has left are generics — .watches along with the the Chinese translation .手表 and the Chinese for “jewelry”, .珠宝, none of which have been launched and in all likelihood are being held defensively.
It’s the same story with L’oreal, the cosmetics company. It also applied for 14 gTLDs, mostly brands, but abandoned all but .lancome prior to contracting.
With .lancome on its way out, L’oreal only owns the generics .skin, .hair, .makeup and .beauty, at least one of which is actually being used.
Also of note is the fact the car company Chrysler is dumping five of its six gTLDs — .chrysler, .dodge, .mopar, .srt and .uconnect — leaving only .jeep (unused) still under contract.
Clearly, Chrysler is not as keen on dot-brands as some of its European competitors, which have been among the most prolific users.
Telefonica’s abandonment of .movistar and .telefonica also means it’s out of the gTLD game completely now, although its Brazilian subsidiary still owns (and uses) .vivo.
Betting company Ladbrokes only ever owned .ladbrokes, though it did unsuccessfully apply for .bet also.
Rounding off the list is .warman, a brand of — and I’m really not making this up — industrial slurry pumps. The pumps are made by a company called Weir, which uses global.weir as its primary web site. So that’s nice.
As far as I can tell, none of the gTLDs that are being killed off had ever been used, though each registry will have paid ICANN six-figure fees since they originally contracted.

Four more dot-brands call it quits

Four more dot-brand gTLDs are to disappear after their operators decided they don’t want them any more.
These are the latest victims of the voluntary cull:

• High-priced bling-maker Richemont, an enthusiastic new gTLD early adopter, is dumping .panerai (a watch brand) and .jlc (for Jaeger-LeCoultre, another watch brand), the sixth and seventh of its fourteen originally applied-for gTLDs to be abandoned.
• Norwegian energy company Equinor, which changed its name from Statoil a few months ago, is getting rid of .statoil for obvious reasons. Will it bother to apply for .equinor next time around? We’ll have to wait (and wait) and see.
• Online printing outfit Vistaprint no longer wants .vista, one of its two delegated TLDs. It still has .vistaprint, and is in contracting with ICANN for its bitterly-won .webs, which matches its Webs.com brand.

The three companies informed ICANN of their intention to scrap their registry agreements between May 14 and June 14, but ICANN only published their requests on its web site in the last few hours.
Needless to say, none of the four TLDs had any live sites beyond their contractually mandated minimum.
The number of delegated new gTLD registries to voluntarily terminate their contracts now stands at 36, all dot-brands.
Under ICANN procedures, the termination requests and ICANN’s decision not to re-delegate the strings to other registries are now open for public comment.

Bling-maker kills off fifth dot-brand gTLD

Richemont, the company behind brands such as Cartier jewelry and Mont Blanc pens, has terminated its fifth dot-brand gTLD.
It filed with ICANN to terminate its registry contract for .iwc earlier this month.
IWC is a Swiss brand of expensive watches, but its dot-brand has never been used to any notable extent.
The company had registered the domain watches.iwc, which it apparently planned to use for URL redirection via Rebrandly.
It’s the third gTLD Richemont has voluntarily terminated, after .montblanc and .chloe last year.
The company also withdrew its unopposed applications for .netaporter and .mrporter back in 2014, before it actually signed contracts with ICANN.
Richemont was one of the more prolific dot-brand applicants, applying for 14 gTLDs in total back in 2012.
It also applied for (defensively?) and won the generic .watches and some translations.
While the .watches gTLD has been live in the DNS for two and a half years, Richemont has not yet set a launch date and has not yet said who will even be eligible to buy domains there.

Richemont kills off two more dot-brands

Luxury goods maker Richemont has decided to ditch two more of its dot-brand gTLDs.
The company has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .chloe and .montblanc, according to documents published by ICANN late last week.
Chloe is a fashion brand; Mont Blanc sells pens, jewelery and such.
No reason was given for either termination. Registries are allowed to self-terminate their Registry Agreements for any reason, given 180 days notice.
In both cases, ICANN has already agreed not to transfer the gTLD to a new operator. That’s a special privilege dot-brands get in their RAs.
Neither gTLD ever progressed beyond a single nic.brand placeholder page
Four additional Richemont dot-brands — .piaget, .iwc, .cartier, .panerai — have also been live for two years or more but are in identical states of disuse.
Richemont also runs .watches, .手表 and .珠宝 (Chinese for “watches” and “jewelry” respectively) which have been in the DNS for over 18 months but do not yet have any published launch plans.
The company was a somewhat enthusiastic early adopter of the new gTLD concept, providing speakers to industry events well before the application window opened back in 2012.
It applied for 14 strings in total, 10 of which eventually went live. It dumped two of its dot-brands before contract-signing and lost two auctions for generic strings.
Both .chloe and .montblanc are expected to be removed from the DNS in October.
There are now 22 new gTLDs that have voluntarily terminated their RAs.

Generics versus brands as two more gTLDs are sold

Two more new gTLD contention sets have been settled by auction, one a case of a portfolio applicant prevailing over a closed generic applicant, the other a case of a brand owner paying off a portfolio applicant.
Donuts has won the right to .jewelry over $10 billion-a-year jewelry firm Richemont, owner of brands including Cartier.
Richemont applied for several TLDs, some of which were generic terms. It was awarded .watches uncontested, but apparently didn’t want to fork out as much as Donuts for the matching .jewelry.
Google, meanwhile, won the two-horse race for .moto against Rightside. This one’s interesting because it’s basically a case of Rightside forcing Google to pay up to own one of its own brands.
Google owns a trademark on “Moto” due to its acquisition of Motorola Mobility a few years ago, but Rightside applied for it in its generic sense as an abbreviation of “motorcycle” or “motorbike”.
Google had filed a legal rights objection against its rival for .moto, but lost. Now it’s been forced to cough up at auction instead.
Prices, as usual, have not been disclosed.

Richemont pulls two dot-brand bids

Luxury goods company Richemont has withdrawn two of its original 14 new gTLD applications.
The company, which has been a vocal supporter of dot-brand gTLDs, pulled its bids for .netaporter and .mrporter this week.
Mr Porter and Net A Porter are fashion retail web sites for men and women respectively.
It’s not clear why these two bids have been withdrawn — the company isn’t commenting — but it’s certainly not a signal that Richemont is abandoning the new gTLD program completely.
The company has already entered into ICANN contracts for six dot-brands including .cartier, .montblanc and .chloe.
It has another five applications — four generics and one brand — that are still active: .手表 (“.watches”), .珠宝 (.jewelry), .watches, .jewelry and .jlc.
It has previously withdrawn an application for .love.

Cartier sues Nominet hoping to set global domain name take-down precedent

Luxury watchmaker Cartier has taken .uk registry Nominet to court, hoping to set a precedent that would enable big brands to have domain names taken down at a whim.
The company sued Nominet in a London court in October, seeking an injunction to force the registry to take down 12 domain names that at the time led to sites allegedly selling counterfeit watches.
We’ve only become aware of the case today after Nominet revealed it has filed its defense documents.
Judging by documents attached to Nominet’s court filings, Cartier sees the suit as a test case that could allow it to bring similar suits against other “less cooperative” registries elsewhere in the world.
In a letter submitted as evidence as part of Nominet’s defense, Richard Graham, head of digital IP at Cartier parent company Richemont International, said that he was:

seeking to develop a range of tools that can be deployed quickly and efficiently to prevent Internet users accessing websites that offer counterfeit goods… [and] looking to establish a precedent that can be used to persuade courts in other jurisdictions where the registries are less cooperative.

It’s worth noting that Richemont has applied for 13 dot-brands under ICANN’s new gTLD program and that Graham is often the face of the applications at conferences and such.
Pretty soon Richemont will also be a domain name registry. We seem to be looking at two prongs of its brand protection strategy here.
According to the company’s suit, the 12 domains in question all had bogus Whois information and were all being used to sell bogus Cartier goods.
None of them used a Cartier trademark in the domain — this is explicitly about the contents of web sites, not their domains names — and Cartier says most appeared to be registered to people in China.
Rather than submitting a Whois inaccuracy complaint with Nominet — which could have led to the domains being suspended for a breach of the terms of service — Cartier decided to sue instead.
Graham actually gave Nominet’s lawyers over a week’s notice that the lawsuit was incoming, writing his letter (pdf) on October 22 and filing the complaint (pdf) with the courts November 4.
Cartier seems to have grown frustrated playing whack-a-mole with bootleggers who cannot be traced and just pop up somewhere else whenever their latest web host is persuaded to cut them off.
Graham’s letter, which comes across almost apologetic in its cordiality when compared to the usual legal threat, reads:

Cartier therefore believes the most cost effective and efficient way to disrupt access to the Counterfeiting Websites operating in the UK is to seek relief from you, as the body operating the registry of .uk domain names.

Armed with the foreknowledge provided by the letter, Nominet reviewed the Whois records of the domains in question, found them lacking, and suspended the lot.
Ten were suspended before Cartier sued, according to Nominet. Another expired before the suit was filed and was re-registered by a third party. A fourth, allegedly registered to a German whose scanned identity card was submitted as evidence by Nominet, was suspended earlier this month.
As such, much of Nominet’s defense (pdf) relies upon what seems to be a new and obscure legal guideline, the “Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct”, that encourages people to settle their differences without resorting to the courts.
Nominet’s basically saying that there was no need for Cartier to sue, because it already has procedures in place to deal with counterfeiters using fake Whois data.
Also offered in the defense are the facts that suspending a domain does not remove a web site, that Nominet does not operate web sites, and the following:

Nominet is not at liberty under its Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration to suspend .uk domain names summarily upon mere receipt of a demand from someone unconnected with the domain name registrant.

That seems to me to be among the most important parts of the defense.
If Cartier were to win this case, it may well set a precedent giving registries (in the UK at least, at first) good reason to cower when they receive dodgy take-down orders from multibillion-dollar brands.
Indeed, that seems to be what Cartier is going for here.
Unfortunately, Nominet has a track record of at least accelerating the takedown of domains based on nothing more than third-party “suspicion”. Its defense actually admits this fact, stating:

Inaccurate identity and contact information generally leads to the suspension of a domain within three weeks. Where suspicions of criminality are formally confirmed by a recognised law enforcement agency, suspension may be very significantly expedited.

I wonder if this lawsuit would have happened had Nominet not been so accommodating to unilateral third-party take-down notices in the past.
In a statement to members today, a copy of which was sent to DI, Nominet encouraged internet users to report counterfeiting web sites to the police if and when they find them.

These are the first four new gTLD domain names

Two luxury goods companies have the honor of being the first to register domain names in a new gTLD.
Today, the first four domain names registered to actual registrants popped up in the zone file for dotShabaka Registry’s Arabic “.web” — شبكة.
شبكة. exited its mandatory Sunrise period on Sunday; the four new names appear to be the first ones to get name servers after their Sunrise applications were approved.
The two registrants, according to Whois records, are Richemont International and Rolex.
Richemont is itself a new gTLD applicant. The company has taken a strong interest in the program, with head of digital IP Richard Graham even moderating a new gTLDs conference in March.
The four names (with my best guesses at a translation) are:

• لانسيل.شبكة — seems to mean “Lancel”, Richemont’s brand of expensive leather bags.
• مونتبلان.شبكة — “Montblanc”, Richemont’s brand for selling watches, pens, cufflinks and such.
• بياجيه.شبكة — “Piaget”, another Richemont brand of watches and jewelry.
• رولكس.شبكة — seems to be the translation or transliteration of “Rolex”.

None appear to be resolving on the web yet, not even to placeholder pages, at least from where I’m sitting.
Because they’re Sunrise names, it’s possible that all four are defensive registrations that may never lead anywhere meaningful.
Richemont used Com Laude as its registrar while Rolex used Key-Systems.
The Sunrise was limited to Arabic-script trademarks.
dotShabaka said yesterday that it had “very few” Sunrise applications. Now we know that number was at least four.

.love dies as applicants pull five more new gTLD bids

Jewelry maker Richemont is the latest new gTLD applicant to withdraw one of its bids, yanking its application for .love.
The proposed gTLD was one of 14 single-registrant namespaces applied for by the company, and also the most heavily contested, with six other applicants competing.
Google, Donuts, TLDH and Uniregistry are also bidding. The string will almost certainly go to auction and may fetch a high price.
Richemont was the only applicant for .love as a “closed generic”, but the string was not among those listed in the Governmental Advisory Committee’s advice in the Beijing communique.
According to its application, Love is also a brand of bracelet produced by its Cartier jewelry business.
It’s the first application Richemont has withdrawn.
The New gTLD Application Tracker has also been updated today to reflect the withdrawals of .spa, .zulu, .free and .sale by Top Level Domain Holdings, which were announced last week but which ICANN has only just finished processing.