Chrysler, a major automotive company, has notified ICANN that it is withdrawing its application for a new top-level domain .RAM, ending the six-year story of a domain that never came into being. In 2013, Chrysler was among the active supporters of the new domain program and filed many applications, one of them for .RAM. Ram is a brand of pickup trucks manufactured by Chrysler, but ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee was strongly opposed to it because Ram is also a variant of the Romanized spelling of Rama – one of the deities of the Hindu pantheon.
Representatives of Chrysler tried to challenge this decision claiming that Ram pickups had been in production for 75 years, and during all that time, Hindus had never filed a single complaint about the name. The company also emphasized that it intends to use the .RAM domain as a closed brand domain, and therefore the registration of any domain names offensive to Hindus in it is completely excluded. However, the application was postponed indefinitely.
Now we can say that time has put everything in its place. Chrysler has clearly cooled to new domains. Previously, as Domain Incite reports, the company dropped the use of the domain brands .CHRYSLER, .DODGE, .MOPAR, .SRT, and .UCONNECT already delegated to it. Now it has also withdrawn the application for .RAM. The only brand domain still managed by the company is .JEEP.
