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The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week

Kevin Murphy, April 15, 2024, Domain Registries

The Swiss government is relaxing the registration rules for its .swiss gTLD so that regular people will be able to register names there from next week.

Previously available only to registered legal entities in Switzerland, from April 24 any Swiss person at home or abroad will also be able to buy .swiss domains.

The TLD will still be heavily regulated, however. You’ll only be able to register domains that match your own name or the name that you are commonly known by. You won’t be able to register common family names without an accompanying given name.

Swiss people living elsewhere will be able to register, but will be forbidden from using their names for commercial purposes.

.swiss lives alongside the country’s official ccTLD, .ch, which is derived from the Latin name for the multilingual nation.

While .swiss is perhaps more internationally recognizable, to date it has attracted only about 26,000 registrations, compared to the 2.5 million in decades-old .ch.

Seven new gTLD applications withdrawn, two after GAC Early Warnings

Kevin Murphy, December 14, 2012, Domain Registries

Seven more new gTLD applications have been officially withdrawn from the ICANN evaluation process, two of which were recently hit with governmental warnings, bringing the total to 13.
The applications yanked since DI’s last update are:

.ansons (CBM Creative Brands Marken GmbH)
.caremore (WellPoint, Inc)
.glean (Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc)
.gmbh (GMBH Registry, LLC)
.hilton (HLT Stakis IP Limited)
.skolkovo (Fund for Development of the Center for Elaboration and Commercialization of New Technologies)
.swiss (Swiss International Air Lines Ltd)

The withdrawal of .swiss means that a contention set is now no longer a contention set.
The other .swiss applicant is the Swiss government itself, which filed a Governmental Advisory Committee Early Warning against its rival last month and is now pretty much guaranteed a win.
The latest withdrawals also thin the field for .gmbh, reducing the number of applicants from six to five.
All of the .gmbh applications received GAC Early Warnings from Germany. The country is concerned that only legal GmbH entities — equivalent to “Ltd” or “LLC” companies — should be able to own these domains.
The .hilton, .glean, .ansons, and .caremore applications were all dot-brands.
So, to an extent, was .skolkovo. Skolkovo is an emerging high-technology campus outside of Moscow with big intentions to become the Russian Silicon Valley. It’s not known why its bid was pulled.