The status of the application of the Indian industrial conglomerate Tata Group for domain .TATA has been changed from “On hold” to “Will Not Proceed”, reports Domain Incite. It seems that this has put an end to this dramatic and not fully comprehensible story. Tata is one of the leaders in Indian national economy; the company is over 100 years old and the annual turnover is of hundreds of billions of dollars. When Tata Group applied for .TATA domain, very few had doubts in its favorable prospects.
However, during the examination of the application it turned out that there is a small province in Morocco called Tata. This fact made “tata” a protected geographic name and now it could have been delegated only if there were no objections from the relevant local authorities. Tata Group it seemed managed to get the support in required. Representatives of the company presented a letter from the Moroccan government and in July 2014 the application for .TATA successfully passed its Geographic Names Review.
But as soon as September of that year something unpredicted happened. It seemed like Moroccan government changed its mind. The digital economy minister of Morocco wrote a letter to ICANN saying that a previously submitted document (the one that provided support for the application) was declared invalid. The application consideration process was therefore suspended and now it seems it has been abolished at all. Representatives of Morocco have sent several letters to ICANN lately where their express a possible desire to apply for .TATA themselves.
