The registry .XYZ announced the acquisition of Dominion Domains’ portfolio of five new generic top-level domain names. The acquisition includes .autos, .homes, .boats, .yachts and .motorcycles. . The company initially released its domains under a restricted model in which registrants had to prove their association with the industry. Registrars also had to pay a fairly high fee for the right to register domain names. All this made the relaunch pretty unsuccessful: as of today, each of the domains except .homes has fewer than 1,000 names registered.
.XYZ plans to relaunch the domains next year. .XYZ founder Daniel Negari told Domain Name Wire, “2021 is going to be the biggest year yet. We are excited to launch/relaunch 10 excellent TLDs and bring more competition and choice to end users worldwide.” It is noteworthy that .XYZ acquired the domains .car, .cars and .auto last summer. Thus, the company owns new gTLDs that are related to most large, expensive purchases. The acquisitions hold promise, but only time will tell the future of these domains.
