Swiss holding Richemont that specializes in making luxury goods has notified ICANN of its decision not to use two delegated new generic top-level domains - .CHLOE and .MONTBLANC. Chloe is a fashion brand, while Montblanc produces exclusive pens, accessories and jewelry.
Domain Incite reports that Richemont holding was one of the keen supporters of the new gTLDs program. Its representatives regularly attended ICANN events dedicated to this issue way before the start of the application submission period in 2012. 10 domains were delegated to the company, including dot-brands .PIAGET, .IWC, .CARTIER and .PANERAI, as well as domains .WATCHES, .手表 and .珠宝 (“watches” and “jewelry” in Chinese respectively). However, Richemont, in fact, hasn’t used a single one of these domains (they have all been in the DNS root zone for at least 1.5 years). In particular, only names nic.chloe and nic.montblanc were registered in .CHLOE and .MONTBLANC, which are now to be eliminated. Supposedly, domains will be deleted from the root zone in October. Therefore, the number of dot-brands, the owners of which decided not to use them, has reached 22.
