Recent Posts
- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
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- Epik to reveal its owners soon
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- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
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- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
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- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
- Did somebody spend a million bucks on a Google domain hack?
Brand kills off gTLD that is actually being USED
Two more companies have told ICANN they’ve changed their minds about running a dot-brand gTLD, including the first example of a TLD that is actually in use.
Dun & Bradstreet has said it no longer wishes to launch .duns, and Australian insurance company iSelect has had enough of .iselect.
Both companies filed to voluntarily terminate their ICANN registry agreements in March, and ICANN published its preliminary decision to allow them to do so this week.
While business data provider D&B never got around to using .duns, .iselect has had dozens of active domains for years.
The company started putting domains in its zone file about three years ago and had over 90 registered names at the last count, with about a dozen indexed by Google. That’s a quite a lot for a dot-brand.
It is using domains such as home.iselect, news.iselect and careers.iselect as redirects to parts of its main corporate site, while domains such as gas.iselect, creditcards.iselect and health.iselect send customers to specific product pages.
They all redirect to its main iselect.com.au site. There are no web sites as far as I can tell that keep visitors in the .iselect realm.
I’m pretty certain this is the first example of a voluntary contract termination by a dot-brand that is actually in active use.
There have been 52 such terminations to date, including these two latest ones, almost all of which have been dot-brands that never got out of the barn door.
That’s over 10% of the dot-brands that were delegated from the 2012 gTLD application round.
Paying a huge amounts of money each year for an extension that will provide zero ROI doesn’t make sense. The initial decision was obviously bad but they’ve done the right thing to scrap it.
Expect a lot from .brand’s to be given back over time, It is like the drop market, some people drop after a couple of years, some people will wait a full ten years, but eventually the crap is given back.