ICANN has announced the termination of its agreements with two registries, Asia Green IT System (AGIT) and Kerry Trading Co. AGIT managed five new gTLDs including .PARS, .SHIA, .TCI, .NOWRUZ, and .همراه . Even though all of them were delegated about ten years ago, none was actually fully launched, with only .NOWRUZ having a few registrations.
AGIT has run into financial straits, or may have been struggling from the start, having misjudged its ability to manage five domains. It stopped paying CoCCA, its back-end provider, and defaulted on the mandatory ICANN fees. The corporation issued a warning to AGIT for breach of contractual obligations. According to Domain Incite, the parties entered into mediation last August, eventually reaching a confidential agreement that would allow the registry to retain its gTLDs. However, AGIT ended up breaching the terms of that agreement as well.
Theoretically, ICANN can decide to auction the failed gTLDs and re-delegate them to the highest bidder, but this scenario seems unlikely. Firstly, all of them are addressed almost exclusively to the Iranian audience; there will hardly be many bidders interested enough. Secondly, nearly five years ago, ICANN tried to auction off another failed gTLD, .WED, which could definitely be of interest to a much wider audience, but the process has never got off the ground.
As for the sixth domain removed from the DNS root zone, .Kerrylogistics, it had been delegated to Hong Kong based logistics company Kerry Trading Co, which never found a use for it.
