It appears that Viktor Dukhovni via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> said: >On Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 04:51:05PM -0400, John Levine via mailop wrote: > >> I agree that overall, the new TLD program has been a failure and makes >> a mockery of ICANN's claim to operate as a public charity in the >> interests of the public. > >Strong words indeed... The bubble does appear to have burst however, >and gradually mostly "brand" TLDs are realising that they've wasted >their money and are not renewing. From 2020-01 there have been 78 >departures (most recent first): ...
So far 134 vanity TLDs have handed the keys back to ICANN. They went through the entire expensive process to apply, got approved, set up servers and signing and such, and got the TLD added to the root, then decided, naahh. I figure that's about a million dollars of destroyed value per domain: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreement-termination-2015-10-09-en There are 326 more domains that have 5 or less names, which I assume are not in use and not likely to be any time soon. A few seem to have been tried for experiments and abandonded, e.g. https://paranoids.yahoo and https://mail.yahoo redirect to real Yahoo web sites. The paranoids server has the wrong SSL cert which suggests they've forgotten about it. Perhaps related, the number of domains in .COM has been shrinking for the past year and a half, which means the total number of registered domains is shrinking since none of the few that are still growing (.org, oddly) are big enough to matter. ICANN is predictably freaking out. R's, John _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop