Wow... a lot of brands abandoning their branded TLDs. I guess they
realized it may be niche and with potential for confusion and not worth
the upkeep expense.
On 7/11/24 7:01 PM, John Levine via mailop wrote:
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
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