Bentley Motors Limited, a famous British luxury carmaker, has notified ICANN that it no longer intends to use the delegated brand domain, .BENTLEY, and is seeking to cancel the contract. According to ICANN’s official website, the notification was received on December 13, 2024. Today, a one-month comment period is open on the website.
According to ICANN’s rules, brand domains, the names of which coincide with the names of registered trademarks, are not subject to re-delegation in case they are refused and removed from the DNS root zone. There is probably no reason to doubt that this fate also awaits .BENTLEY. According to Domain Name Wire, Bentley Motors Limited at least tried to use its brand domain. There were a handful of domains registered under .BENTLEY, including extraordinaryjourneys.bentley, service.bentley, and events.bentley. But all of them forwarded to pages on the company’s main website in the .COM gTLD. Unfortunately, the company never used its brand domain more actively than that.
