Centralnic has announced that they will be “sunsetting” several of their SLD based extensions.
The impacted extensions are:
- .AR.COM
- .GB.COM
- .HU.COM
- .KR.COM
- .QC.COM
- .NO.COM
- .SE.COM
- .UY.COM
From April 29th 2016 (today) no new registrations or renewals will be permitted in any of the impacted extensions.
The domains will “go dark” on April 30 2017.
I’ve no idea how many “domains” are impacted by the change. They’re not “real” domain names in many respects, as they’re subdomains of short .com registrations. However Centralnic and others have created a good business in offering these kind of extensions for sale.
Some of the other Centralnic domains are used by fairly big household brands including Avon cosmetics.
In the last couple of years Centralnic has diversified their business quite dramatically and now offer registry backend services for several new TLD registries including .xyz and Radix. They also operate a couple of registrar brands including Internet.bs.
The sales pitch for renting out 3LDs in these invented extensions – which would have been partly based on scarcity of options – must seem far less compelling now that hundreds of nTLDs are floating around.
Joseph
Maybe, but a lot of the Centralnic extensions are an alternative for ccTLDs that are either very big (so options limited) or have restrictive registrations policies.
Thanks for your comment
Michele
This is inevitable as the world moves toward just one dot in domain name. Simplicity is what consumers want.
Its an absolute scandal that they are taking away the domain names of registrants. People registered these domains believing they
had the domain name provided they paid the renewal fees. This is unacceptable there will be many bvusiness adversely affected
in a huge way.
This is not acceptable.
I agree with you Brian.
Tbh though, companies shouldn’t be building a web presence on a sub-domain they have on control over. You are kind of stupid to be buying these not know what they are. This news just proves that point.