ICANN terminates six gTLDs, five of which may face auction

Recently, ICANN terminated the contracts of six generic top-level domain (gTLD) registries, reducing the number of gTLDs on the Internet. Five of them are managed by Asia Green IT System (AGIT), namely .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd); the other .kerrylogistics was terminated by Kerry Trading Co.

The five gTLDs managed by AGIT were terminated mainly because it failed to fulfill its registry management obligations stipulated by ICANN. The company stopped paying fees to back-end service provider CoCCA and owed ICANN fees. Even though it reached a secret settlement agreement with ICANN in August last year, AGIT still violated the terms of the agreement. Kerry Trading Co terminated .kerrylogistics on its own because its Hong Kong express company Kerry unilaterally informed ICANN that it would no longer operate the TLD.

These six gTLD terminations reflect ICANN's strict requirements for the compliance of registries. Although there is a possibility that five gTLDs will be auctioned and reactivated, the prospects are not optimistic.

The five gTLDs managed by AGIT were terminated this time, namely:

.shia refers to a major branch of Islam.

.pars is related to Persian culture and language.

.nowruz represents the Persian New Year celebration.

.tci was originally designed for Iran Telecom, but can be repurposed.

.همراه means "companion" and is related to Iranian mobile operators.

These domain names are closely related to Iran in terms of culture, religion, business, etc., and there are legal and cultural sensitivity issues that may discourage potential buyers. The previous failed auctions of gTLDs such as .wed and .desi are examples.

Source: domainincite