Investment corporation CITIC, one of the largest financial state-owned companies of China, announced total redirection of its CITIC.COM domain to its new dot-brand domain .CITIC. It not only announced redirection, but has already done it in practice. Domain CITIC.COM is now used only to redirect to LIMITED.CITIC.
It is noteworthy that redirection has not affected Google ranking of CITIC: Google search returns LIMITED.CITIC as the third result, the first two are links to Wikipedia articles. There is no link to CITIC.COM in the top results at all.
Obviously, CITIC is not the first company to launch a dot-brand domain. However, full transition from a “classical” domain .COM to a new company’s domain perhaps can be considered the first precedent of this kind. Experts believe it to be a very important and even landmark case for the whole New gTLD Program.
“Such turn of events was entirely predictable: there are a lot of dot-brands among new gTLDs that were registered to transfer companies to their own brands. .YANDEX is this kind of domain in Russia. Domestic Internet giant announced back at the delegation stage that domain names in the gTLD .YANDEX are not going to the sold. The company plans to use it for its own purposes, for example, to transfer mail or search machine. So, I believe that we’ll see a lot of precedents like this in the near future”, said Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet.
