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- .ai rival lines up gTLD bid
- Team Internet lays off 200
- Sixteen more orgs vie for cheap gTLDs, but…
- So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?
- Cloud gTLD gets launch dates
- Governments say new gTLD program “credibility” at stake
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- Goodyear tires of its dot-brand
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So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?
Amazon went into sunrise with three gTLDs this week, and I thought it might be interesting to pore over the latest zone files to see which companies are the most motivated to protect their brands nowadays.
First, because sometimes the results are just weird. Second, because countless new gTLD consultants are trawling the business world for prospects right now, and sunrise participation data might be useful as lead generation.
Amazon launched .you, .talk and .fast on Tuesday, so these results are for the first two days of sunrise, a period that lasts for a month. As such, there are only a few dozen registered domains in each TLD, at most.
Let’s start with the weird: dog food companies seem to fear cybersquatting more than you might imagine. Mars brands Orijen, Champion Pet Foods and Acana are all protected (though no more of Mars’ dozens of consumer brands), as is independent retailer PetSmart.
An AI company have a presence on the list, which is a relatively new phenomenon for sunrise periods. Anthropic has registered both “anthropic” and “claude”, for its chatbot, in all three TLDs.
Financial companies have a strong presence on the lists, with Freddie Mac, Bank of America, Intesa Sanpaolo, Merrill and Astorg all registering names. Energy brands Iberdrola and Avangrid are registered.
Conscious Capital, a Swiss investment company that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, has defended its brand. That’s notable because the company uses a .us domain for its web site and the .com is listed for sale by a domainer for $2 million.
1-800-Flowers.com, which has somehow managed to get a Trademark Clearinghouse listing for “flowers” — the product it sells — participated in the sunrises as usual. The gTLD .flowers belongs to XYZ.com.
Hotel chain Hilton, podcasters Wondery, construction company VINCI Concessions (vinci-concessions.you???) and tech firms Broadcom and AT&T have all also got in quick to grab their matching domains.
The sunrise periods run until September 25, with general availability following hot on their heels.
Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed
Amazon is set to launch not two but at least three of its dormant new gTLDs in the next few months, according to ICANN documentation.
As reported earlier this week, .talk and .fast are set to go to sunrise in August and general availability in September, and now they’ll be joined by a third: .you.
.you will enter a one-month sunrise period for trademark owners August 25, to be immediately followed by GA. There’ll likely also be a five-day Early Access Period.
The releases follow the launch of .free, .hot and .spot last month.
Amazon and Google deal on .talk, .play, .drive and others
Google and Amazon have started making deals to settle their new gTLD contention sets.
Google won three contention sets against Amazon this week, judging by the latest withdrawals, while Amazon won two.
Amazon won .talk and .you after Google, the only other applicant, withdrew.
Neither company appears to have a “You” brand, unless you count YouTube, but the .talk settlement strongly suggests that Google Talk, the company’s instant messaging client, is on the way out.
When Google applied for .talk in 2012 it intended to give Talk users custom domains to act as a contact point, but in 2013 Google started to indicate that it will be replaced as a brand by Google Hangouts.
The withdrawal seems to suggest that the existence of a gTLD application, a relatively small investment, is not an overwhelming factor when companies consider product rebranding.
I wonder what effect a live, active TLD will have on similar decisions in future.
But Google won the two-horse races for .dev and .drive and after Amazon withdrew its applications.
Google has a product called Google Drive, while Amazon runs Amazon Cloud Drive. Both companies have developer programs, though Google’s is arguably the more substantial of the two.
Google has also won .play — Google Play is its app store — after Amazon, Radix and Star Registry’s withdrawals. Amazon does not have a Play brand.
Google has also withdrawn its application for .book, leaving six remaining applicants, including Amazon, in the contention set.
I don’t currently know whether these contention sets were settled privately or via a third-party auction.
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