A company controlled by Warner Bros Discovery is dumping four of its dot-brand gTLDs, but keeping hold of .food, which it has been sitting on, unused for the better part of eight years.
Lifestyle Domain Holdings has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .foodnetwork, .travelchannel, .hgtv and .cookingnetwork, which are four of its US cable TV channels.
Unusually, the termination notice contains a bit of color explaining its decision:
Despite efforts over the years to develop a marketing strategy for deployment of these assets, the company has determined there is not a current use for them and therefore requests early termination of the ICANN Registry Agreements and to wind down these assets
The gTLDs have never been used, something that can also be said for the remainder of Lifestyle's original portfolio of 11 gTLDs.
The registry was originally owned by Scripps Networks, but following a series of M&A since last year it's been majority owned by media giant Warner Bros Discovery.
It also has current contracts for .food, .diy, .cityeats, .living, .frontdoor, .lifestyle, and the mysterious .vana (presumably a brand that Scripps was planning to launch in 2012 that never materialized).
The registry's back-end was Verisign and its new gTLD consultant was Jennifer Wolfe.
Source from domainincite.com
Domain Name - Register Domain - Transfer Domain
.COM $11.99, .ORG $12.99, .HK $16.99
ICANN & Verisign & HKIRC Accredited Registrar
Shared Hosting & Dedicated Server Provider (HK)
??????? ???????: John Crain named ICANN CTO
