Germany crosses 10,000 dot-brand domains milestone

The number of domains registered to Germany-based dot-brand registries crossed the 10,000 mark in the last few weeks, thanks to a handful of enthusiastic registrants.

That’s almost half of all the domains currently showing up in dot-brand zone files, which stands at just over 21,000, according to my database.

German companies have been the most-prolific users of dot-brands, with the financial services company Deutsche Vermögensberatung (DVAG) currently accounting for over 7,500 domains.

As well as having several corporate web sites on .dvag domains, DVAG gives out firstname-lastname.dvag domains to its network of financial advisors, with each domain redirecting to a personalized, template-driven digital business card on dvag.de.

Car-maker Audi, part of Volkswagen, is the second-biggest user, with over 1,700 current .audi domains connecting its network of dealerships and many domains for individual car brands. Its dealers also get template-driven brochureware web sites, but there’s no redirect to a different TLD.

Fellow car-maker BMW and retailer Schwarz Gruppe, owner of the Lidl supermarket chain, are among the other dot-brands with hundreds of domains to their name.

Microsoft moving its cloud apps from .com to .microsoft

Microsoft is planning to move all of its Microsoft 365 apps off a multitude of .com domains and consolidate them all under .microsoft, its dot-brand gTLD.

The company says it will move Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 web apps to the cloud.microsoft domain. They currently use domains such as outlook.office.com, teams.microsoft.com and microsoft365.com.

It first announced the move in April last year and this week reminded developers of apps that use its cloud platform that they need to support the new domain.

Explaining the move to the dot-brand last year, the company wrote:

Consolidating authenticated user-facing Microsoft 365 experiences onto a single domain will benefit customers in several ways. For end users, it will streamline the overall experience by reducing sign-in prompts, redirects, and delays when navigating across apps. For admins, it will drastically reduce the complexity of the allow-lists required to help your tenant stay secure while enabling users to access the apps and services they need to do their work.

Microsoft plans to launch the teams.cloud.microsoft domain in June but run the two domain schemes in parallel for a while, so as to not unnecessarily break apps in its developer ecosystem.

It’s not going to dump microsoft.com altogether, saying that it plans to use it for “non-product experiences such as marketing, support, and e-commerce.”

The cloud.microsoft domain is already one of the more visible dot-brand names out there, ranking in the top 20 most-visited, according to Majestic rankings.

Hat tip: The Register.

Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD

Brazilian cosmetics maker Natura has become the latest new gTLD operator to tell ICANN to terminate its dot-brand contract.

The company said it is “no longer interested” in operating .natura, and ICANN has agreed to end the Registry Agreement.

Natura was not using the domain beyond the mandatory nic.natura, but my records show that it did start experimenting with usage about five years ago.

A handful of domains, including global.natura, app.natura and innovationchallenge.natura were active and resolved to full-content web sites, but these were all shut off at the end of 2023.

The move comes at a time when Natura has been in a cost-cutting drive, divesting various assets and de-listing itself from the New York Stock Exchange.

The string “natura” is a dictionary word in some languages, meaning “nature” in Italian for example, so it could feasibly be applied for in future new gTLD program rounds.

Airline gTLD crashes and burns

Another would-be dot-brand has added itself to the list of “On second thoughts…” gTLD registries, asking ICANN to tear up its contract.

Century-old Avianca, Colombia’s largest airline, filed its termination papers with ICANN in December and ICANN published them for comment last week.

While the original 2012 application clearly stated that .avianca was intended as a single-registrant dot-brand, Avianca never actually got around to applying for its Spec 13 exemptions so I won’t be technically counting it as a dead dot-brand.

Despite being operational since early 2016, the TLD never had any registrations beyond the mandatory nic.avianca registry placeholder.

The back-end registry services provider and original application consultant was Identity Digital (née Afilias).

Life insurance company kills dot-brand

An American life insurance company’s gTLD has become the 25th dot-brand to be abandoned in 2023.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America has asked ICANN to cancel its contract to run .guardian, which it has barely used.

The company had been running a newsletter at connect.guardian but interest in that seems to have dried up around 2020. No other .guardian domains had been registered.

It had been in a bit of a scuffle with UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media, which also applied for .guardian, during the application process.

The publisher settled for .theguardian instead, but abandoned that post-delegation in 2016, after selling sister newspaper brand .observer to Identity Digital.

Assuming the termination is not withdrawn, it will leave ICANN with 375 contracted dot-brands, from its initial total of 494.

Two more dot-brands bite the dust

Comcast has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate two of its dot-brand gTLDs, which it hasn’t been using.

The US cable company said it wants to terminate its Registry Agreements for .comcast and .xfinity but didn’t say why.

My records show no registered names in either TLD, apart from the obligatory nic. domains. Comcast has no other dot-brands.

Assuming the terminations go through, it will reduce the number of contracted dot-brands to 376 from an initial total of 494.

Gap drops some dot-brands

American clothing retailer Gap has dumped two of its unused dot-brand gTLDs.

The company has told ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .oldnavy and .bananarepublic, the names of two of its store chains, saying it isn’t using them.

Gap still owns .gap, and hasn’t yet asked for it to be cancelled, but it isn’t using that either.

The company’s TLDs all run on GoDaddy’s back-end and are managed by Fairwinds Partners.

The terminations bring the total number of dead dot-brands this year to 23, spread across 12 companies.

Wood company scraps its dot-brand

A Swedish wood-products company has become the latest company to ask ICANN to terminate its dot-brand gTLD registry agreement.

Svenska Cellulosa AB, which Wikipedia tells me makes almost $2 billion a year selling paper and wood pulp, is dumping .sca, which it has never used.

While ICANN will not transition the gTLD to another operator, there are plenty of other organizations in the world using the same abbreviation, so the string itself could show up in the root again in future.

The TLD was managed by Valideus on a Verisign back-end. Verisign is getting out of the dot-brand back-end business.

Assuming SCA’s request is not withdrawn, it will become the 120th dot-brand to self-terminate.

ICANN rejects a whole bunch of new gTLD policy stuff

ICANN has delivered some bad news for dot-brands, applicants from poorer countries, and others, at the weekend rejecting several items of new gTLD policy advice that the community spent years cooking up.

The board of directors on Sunday approved a scorecard of determinations, including the rejection (or non-adoption) of seven GNSO recommendations that it deems “would not be in the best interests of the ICANN community or ICANN”.

In reality, it’s the latter that seems to have been foremost in the board’s mind; most of the rejections appear to be geared toward reducing ICANN Org’s legal or financial exposure.

Notably, dot-brands are denied some of the relief from cumbersome or expensive requirements that the GNSO had wanted rid of.

The board rejected a recommendation that would exempt them from the Continued Operations Instrument — a financial bond used to pay an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator should the applicant go out of business.

“[T]he Board is concerned that an exemption from an COI for Spec 9 applications would have financial impact on ICANN since there would be no fund to draw from if such a registry went into EBERO,” the board wrote.

It also rejected a request to exempt dot-brands from rules requiring them to contractually ban and monitor abuse in their TLDs. The GNSO had argued that single-registrant TLDs do not suffer abuse, but the board said this could lead to abuse from compromised domains going unaddressed.

“The Board concludes that Recommendation 9.2, if implemented, could lead to DNS abuse for second-level registrations in a single-registrant TLD going unaddressed, unobserved, and unmitigated,” it said.

Applicants hoping to benefit from the Applicant Support Program — which in 2012 offered heavily discounted application fees to poorer applicants — also got some bad news.

The GNSO wants the support to extend to other costs such as application-writing services and lawyers, which naturally enough put the frighteners on the board, which noted “such expansion of support could raise the possibility of inappropriate use of resources (e.g. inflated expenses, private benefit concerns, and other legal or regulatory concerns)”.

The board also rejected a couple of recommendations that could be seen as weakening its role as ultimate authority over all things gTLD.

It rejected a proposal to remove the controversial covenant not to sue (CNTS) from the application process unless other recommendations related to appeals processes are implemented.

ICANN said that because it has not yet approved these other recommendations, it has rejected this recommendation.

The board also rejected a recommendation that would have limited its ability to reject a gTLD application to only when permitted to do so by the rules set out in the Applicant Guidebook.

The idea was to prevent applications being arbitrarily rejected, but the board said this “may unduly limit ICANN’s discretion to reject an application in yet-to-be-identified future circumstance(s)”.

The rejections invoke part of the ICANN bylaws that now requires the GNSO Council to convene and either affirm or amend its recommendations before discussing them with the board. Presumably this could happen at ICANN 78 next month.

The bylaws process essentially gives the board the ultimately authority to throw out the GNSO recommendations if it can muster up a two-thirds supermajority vote, something it rarely has a problem achieving.

Volkswagen ditches its dot-brand

Another major car-maker has thrown in the towel on its key dot-brand gTLD. This time it’s Volkswagen.

Referring to .volkswagen, the company has told ICANN: “This top level domain has never been utilized by Volkswagen of America and we do not intend to utilize it.”

The company had already ditched its secondary dot-brand, .大众汽车 (.xn--3oq18vl8pn36a), which is the Chinese version of its name.

Fiat Chrysler and Bugatti have both also previously terminated dot-brand contracts, while Seat and Audi each have thousands of names in their main dot-brand gTLDs.