A few days ago, it was reported that ICANN had issued a breach of contract notice to Asia Green IT System, a Turkish company that manages five new gTLDs .NOWRUZ, .PARS, .SHIA, .TCI, and .همراه. The registry did not provide required Whois information, failed to make a payment on due date to ICANN's budget, and did not communicate with ICANN representatives. Asia Green IT System was given until the end of July to correct the deficiencies. But the end came much earlier.
The reason for the quick and energetic measures on the part of ICANN was, apparently, the information that the CoCCA, which acted as the technical operator of its domain zones, had previously terminated the contract with Asia Green IT System. Obviously, ICANN considered that there was simply no chance of correction in this situation before the end of the month. As a result, according to the Domain Insight, .NOWRUZ was included in the EBERO (Emergency Back-End Registry Operator) program. Its temporary operator was the Nominet, which manages the UK national domain .UK.
The four remaining Asia Green IT System domains simply do not need any action, since not a single name is registered in them, with the exception of the nic required by the registry itself. However, there are barely ten registrations in .NOWRUZ, and therefore the load on Nominet will not increase too much. .NOWRUZ was only the third since 2012 to be included in the EBERO program due to the failure of the original registries. Previously, this fate befell the .DESI and .WED. At the same time, the latter’s chances of finding a new permanent registry were regarded as quite high: the word wed means “wedding,” and there are a great many wedding-themed websites. In 2021, ICANN announced plans to auction the rights to manage .WED, but the matter has not yet progressed beyond talk.
