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Three more dot-brands throw in the towel

Kevin Murphy, March 21, 2018, Domain Registries

Two companies have told ICANN they no longer wish to operate some of their dot-brand gTLDs.
First, Sony has decided to junk its .xperia TLD.
Xperia is a brand of mobile phones the company sells. The matching gTLD, which entered the DNS root mid-2015, only ever had the contractually mandated nic.xperia delegated.
Sony still has .sony and .playstation active. The latter doesn’t seem to have any live web sites, but .sony is seeing some light usage with sites such as pro.sony and lostinmusic.sony.
The next dot-brand to get ditched is .meo, owned by leading Portuguese mobile telco MEO.
MEO has also dumped .sapo, which is its ISP brand.
Again, neither gTLD had never seen any action beyond their nic. sites, despite being delegated over three years ago.
Both companies told ICANN in January that they wish to end the Registry Agreement contracts.
ICANN last week decided not to open any of the strings for redelegation and opened up its decision for comments.

AusRegistry scores Japanese .brand deal

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2010, Domain Registries

AusRegistry, the .au registry, has inked a deal with Brights Consulting, a company offering .brand domain services to the Japanese corporate market.
The company said the deal will mean AusRegistry will provide the technical back-end for any successful new gTLD applications that Brights manages to secure.
Other companies competing for new gTLD business include old hands VeriSign, Neustar and Afilias, as well as hungry newcomers such as Minds + Machines.
AusRegistry currently manages Australia’s .au, .qa for Qatar and .ae for the United Arab Emirates.
Brights is a corporate, rather than retail, ICANN registrar. I may be wrong, but it looks like the company counts Sony among its clients.
Could there be a .sony on the horizon?