A university, an insurance company and a consumer goods company bow out of new TLD program.
Three more companies have informed ICANN that they wish to terminate their dot-brand top level domain names.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) is one of the few educational institutions that applied for top level domains. The Melbourne research university appears to have created only one domain (other than nic.) on the .rmit TLD: next.rmit. Google search results show it was used as a place for students, faculty and other stakeholders to discuss the university’s future.
Swiftcover Insurance Services Limited told ICANN it wants to cancel .swiftcover. Google results only show nic.swift.
Dabur India Limited let ICANN know it wants out of .dabur. Dabur is a consumer goods company in India. Two domains other than .nic are indexed in Google. One is social.dabur, which forwards to a page on Dabur.com that aggregates its social media content. The other is doctor.dabur, which was used for a doctor consent form for the company’s “Ask Dabur” campaign.
Another set for the “brand TLD advisor community” to dig through and find some irrelevant factoid which caused these TLDs to fail to generate any return. Obviously, the problem was that they were not getting advice from the right set of TLD advisors who can weave a brand TLD out of the finest golden thread…
Out of interest what happened to a domain name if a GTLD decides to shut down and you’ve invested money buying the name and invested in its marketing and SEO? How does ICANN take this into account during closures of GTLD’s?
ICANN only allows complete shutdown of single-registrant TLDs. If the TLD has registrants other than the registry, then it must transition to a new registry operator, possibly after spending some time in EBERO (where domains resolve and can be changed, but no new domains can be registered).