Registration of .brand top-level domains to cease soon in new TLDs

Today I received an alert that another .brand top level domain owner stopped the registration of its domain name.

Dabur, a company that sells Ayurvedic (traditional Indian medicine) products, decided to cancel its .dabur domain. Curiously, the company had previously issued a termination notice in 2021, but later withdrew it. Apart from setting up a mandatory nic.dabur domain, the company does not seem to be using .dabur.

The 150 .brand domains that have been canceled face the same problem. Many companies spend money on TLDs that match their brand but never use them.

To be sure, some companies are using their .brand domains. Fox is one example. Here's a cool tool to use verify.tool to verify that content is indeed from Fox. wayfinder.fox can help you find Fox Studios.

But I think most people, even those promoting dot-branded domains in the 2012 new TLD rounds, will admit that usage has been low.

One big reason for this is that many of the 2012 applications were defensive. While there are many protections in place to prevent people from snatching up TLDs, brand owners remain convinced that they should pay to prevent this from happening.