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XYZ acquires 5 more top level domains including .Autos, .Homes

by — Uncategorized 13 Comments

XYZ picks up Dominion Domains’ portfolio.

Picture of a house, yacht, boat, motorcycle and car

New top level domain name registry XYZ has acquired Dominion Domains’ portfolio of five top level domain names. The acquisition includes .autos, .homes, .boats, .yachts and .motorcycles.

This summer, XYZ bought out partner Frank Schilling for .car, .cars, and .auto.

The Dominion Domains acquisition means that XYZ now has a large collection of top level domain names related to major purchases.

XYZ founder Daniel Negari told Domain Name Wire, “2021 is going to be the biggest year yet. We are excited to launch/relaunch 10 excellent TLDs and bring more competition and choice to end users worldwide.”

Dominion Enterprises set up Dominion Domains to capitalize on its existing customer base. Dominion publishes Homes.com and Franchise.com, and also provides services to auto and marine dealers.

The company initially released its domains under a restricted model in which registrants had to be associated with the industry. The verification process, combined with high registrar onboarding fees designed to turn off third-party registrars, led to only four registrars offering its .boats and .yachts domains upon launch.

Dominion Domains later removed restrictions on its domains and re-engaged with the registrar channel. The only Dominion domain that got traction was .homes, which has over 13,000 domains in the zone. (Many of those are registered at one small registrar.) Its other top level domains each have fewer than 1,000 registrations.

XYZ has experience relaunching top level domains by restructuring their pricing and positioning, and giving them a jolt of marketing.

 

This .yachts domain shouldn’t have been lost in a UDRP, but…

by — Policy & Law 5 Comments

The domain name owner had a great defense but didn’t reply to the filing.

A World Intellectual Property Organization panelist has ordered the domain name virgin.yachts be transferred to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Enterprises.

I did a doubletake when I saw this decision. In order to register a .yachts domain name, you have to be affiliated with a company in the industry.

Indeed, the domain name virgin.yachts is registered in the name of a company called Virgin Yachts that’s set up in Florida. Just looking at the whois record you can see that the owner of virgin.yachts owns virginyachtsllc.com, which forwards to virgin-yachts.com.

In other words, the respondent has a legitimate interest in the domain name and probably didn’t register it in bad faith.

There may well be a legitimate trademark dispute, but it falls outside the realm of UDRP.

However, the owner didn’t respond to the UDRP. I think it should have been obvious to both the complainant and perhaps the panelist, but without the response, whatever the complainant said was accepted by the panelist. The complainant obviously didn’t point out these facts.

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