Wednesday, March 25, 2020

UPDATE: The .DEALER new gTLD

The official "TLD STARTUP INFORMATION" ICANN web page was just updated with fresh infos about the .DEALER new gTLD.

Official dates:
  1. Sunrise Period: 29 Apr 2020 to 31 May 2020;
  2. Trademark Claims Period: 8 Jun 2020 to 6 Sep 2020.
What the application says:
  • The intended mission and purpose of the .DEALER gTLD is to serve as a trusted and intuitive namespace for the benefit of Dealer.com, its qualified subsidiaries’, affiliates’ customers and other Internet users. The .DEALER gTLD will deepen and broaden these entities’ relationships with those audiences.
  • The .DEALER gTLD may be thought of most appropriately as a “Brand TLD” in that it serves primarily to provide a trusted, hierarchical and intuitive namespace for businesses that use Dealer.com’s broad range of online dealership products and services. Although ICANN has not specifically recognized a Brand TLD category, such as the .DEALER gTLD, in the current round, it is widely anticipated in the brand community that this will become a specialty subset of gTLDs. The .DEALER gTLD is planned to protect Dealer.com’s online presence and identity, expand its marketing and promotion efforts, provide a secure channel for online products and services, and offer a platform through which to consolidate many of the intellectual property activities of Dealer.com.
  • Dealer.com intends to initially limit registration and use of domain names within the .DEALER gTLD to Dealer.com and its qualified partners and affiliates. This initial limited use will allow Dealer.com to establish .DEALERʹs operations and achieve full sustainability. This limited distribution coupled with the other requirements set forth in Specification 9 of the template Registry Agreement is intended to exempt Dealer.com from its annual Code of Conduct Compliance requirements.
  • After the initial stages of operation, Dealer.com will evaluate whether opportunities exist to carry out the business strategy for the gTLD through expansion that continues the sustainable operations of the registry through fee-based registrations to parties other than Dealer.com and its qualified partners and affiliates.
There are 3 more stages to read in the application.

FAQs from the Registry website
  • The FAQ says there are no Premium domain names but their renewal fee are higher;
  • The MSRP for .dealer domains is $1,999 USD for the 1st year (good luck with that): I don't understand what MSRP stands for.
  • There are no requirements to acquire a ".dealer" domain name: they can be registered by any individual or business, whether they are authorized domain dealers or not, and can be used for any purpose: this has nothing to do with what the application says and my understanding of this - note that this is not the first time - is that the application published by the ICANN was not updated after changes were made. 

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !