ICANN’s senior management issued a final decision to delete 19 applications for new gTLDs that remain hanging since the first round of the 2012 new gTLD program. The strings have not been greenlit for various reasons, including delegation to luckier candidates, being non-compliant with ICANN policies or being rejected by the Governmental Advisory Committee. For example, applications for .CORP, .MAIL and .HOME were rejected due to the risk of technical issues as similar domains are widely used behind the firewall.
Regardless of the reasons, applicant companies have not withdrawn their applications for over ten years now even though the strings have no chance of being approved. As the next round of the new gTLD domain program is coming up, ICANN decided to clean up the mess a little. Eviction notices have been served to 15 companies, including heavy lifters like Google, Amazon and Identity Digital. The domain applications to be deleted are for .HOTEL, .SHOP, .ISLAM and other strings.
The companies are to withdraw their applications within 90 days if they wish to receive a partial refund of 20% of the application fees. Domain Incite reports that ICANN expects to pay $703,000 in total compensation. Yet, if the applicants ignore the warning, the funds will remain in the corporation’s budget.
Eight more applications are considered failed but have not been included in the ‘strike out’ list after 90 days. The applicants for domains like .WEBS, .WEB and .GCC refuse to be defeated and continue disputing ICANN’s decisions through litigation.
