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.

German motoring club dot-brand crashes out

Europe’s largest motoring club has become the latest organization to ask ICANN to tear up its dot-brand Registry Agreement.

The Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club, which has about 21 million members, has told ICANN it no longer wishes to run .adac. As usual, no explanation was provided.

The gTLD was in use — ADAC currently has a few live non-redirecting sites, including blog.adac and presse.adac. Its primary domain is adac.de.

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.

ICANN terminates these three deadbeat registrars

Registrars based in the US, Philippines and Bangladesh have lost their ICANN accreditations for non-payment of fees.

ICANN recently sent termination notices to Domainia, HOAPI, and Innovadeus, which the Org says have breached their contracts by not paying and in some cases failing to provide required information and services on their web sites.

It appears all three companies are no longer operational. Domainia’s domain resolves to a GoDaddy sales lander, HOAPI’s is NX’d, and Innovadeus’s site is riddled with WordPress errors.

Innovadeus and HOAPDI were first deemed “past due” on their fees in November 2020, according to ICANN. For Domainia, it was September 2020.

Fortunately, it seems few to no registrants will be affected by the terminations. HOAPI had one gTLD domain under management, its own. Domainia had none, and Innovadeus had a few hundred, which will be transferred to another registrar.

Bye-bye Alice’s Registry

One of ICANN’s oldest accredited registrars has had its contract terminated for non-payment of fees and other alleged breaches.

Alice’s Registry, which has been around since 1999, has been told it’s no longer allowed to sell gTLD domains and that whatever remains of its managed domains will be transferred to another registrar.

The termination comes at the end of more than two years of ICANN’s Compliance department pursuing AR for not paying its accreditation fees, not operating a working Whois service, not implementing RDAP, and not showing its company is in good standing.

The registrar’s web site hasn’t been working in many months, and until its accreditation was suspended last October it had not responded to ICANN’s calls and emails.

Its responses to Compliance since then did not help its case, so ICANN made the decision to terminate.

Costa Rica’s only registrar gets terminated

Costa Rica no longer has any in-country accredited registrars, after ICANN terminated Toglodo for non-payment of fees.

ICANN told the company last week that its accreditation is terminated effective February 23.

It seems Toglodo owed ICANN thousands of dollars in past-due fees. The Org says had been chasing it for money since at least March last year, but had not managed to make contact.

The registrar once had a few thousand gTLD domains under management, mostly .coms, but that’s dwindled to almost nothing recently. Whatever domains remain, ICANN will attempt to transfer to another registrar.

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.

Donuts shuts down 14 registrars, but it’s “not related to DropZone”

Donut has let 14 of its shell registrar accreditations expire, but told DI it’s not related to its recently approve drop-catching service, DropZone.

ICANN records show that the companies, with names such as Name118 Inc and Name104 Inc, all basically mini-clones of Name.com, recently had their registrar contracts terminated.

This kind of thing happens fairly regularly with companies resizing the networks they use for catching dropping domains. Donuts still has at least half a dozen active accreditations, records show.

But the move comes just weeks after ICANN approved a controversial new Donuts service called DropZone, which would see dropping domains across Donuts’ portfolio of 250+ gTLDs being handled by a dedicated parallel registry.

DropZone would reduce the need for owning vast numbers of shell accreditations in order to effectively drop-catch, but has faced criticism from rival DropCatch because a) Donuts may charge registrars for access and b) claims that Donuts-owned registrars would have an advantage.

But Donuts says the two things are unrelated. Name.com senior product marketing manager Ethan Conley said in an email:

We did recently let 14 ICANN registrar accreditations expire. These accreditations had become an administrative headache and a point of confusion for customers. This decision was not related to DropZone, and the domain drop business has not been a core focus of Name.com for quite some time.

It’s worth noting that cancelling registrar accreditations would also have an affect on the ability to catch names in other, unaffiliated gTLDs, including .com.