Daily Wrap: .COM/.NET Keywords in June, Cyrillic Domains in Bulgaria and Two-Character Country Codes May Become Available In gTLDs

The recent referendum in the United Kingdom that saw the people vote to leave the European Union has seen “Brexit” join the list of top ten keywords for .com, according to a blog post on the Verisign website.

The list of top ten keywords in .com domain names registered in June were worlds, casino, visit, plastic, Brexit, listings, popup, physical, hearing and degree. For .net the list was completely different. The top ten keywords in .net domain names were pass, luxury, wall, hearing, rehab, Vietnam, aids, snap, tool and York.

The first domain name using the .бг top level domain, in Cyrillic characters, has gone live, according to a Novinite report. The TLD was somewhat controversial because of its similarity to Brazil’s ccTLD .br. The first domain to go live was Имена.бг (“names”).

The Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications will be setting up a list of state institutions and municipalities, like софия.бг (the name of the capital Sofia in Cyrillic) or президент.бг. (“president.bg”) to avoid any registrations that could potentially tarnish these institutions’ reputation the report notes. Following this process registrations for .бг will commence with priority given to trademarks and company names and other applicants whose name request is “well-founded”.

ICANN is proposing to introduce process for gTLD registry operators to release what would often be valuable two-character domains. If adopted it would see “all gTLD Registry Operators who implement these measures would be authorised to release all reserved two-letter second-level domains.”

If the proposal goes ahead, before they can be publicly released registry operators would have to allow a 30 day period where any country codes “will be made exclusively available to the applicable country-code manager or government.”

“The new proposal, introduced in an attempt to settle a long-running debate about the most appropriate way to enable the release of two-character strings, appears to add a ‘buy it or lose it’ component to existing policy,” according to Domain Incite.

“Under the base New gTLD Registry Agreement, all two-character domains were initially reserved.

“Then, in late 2014, ICANN said registries could release all letter-number, number-letter and number-number combinations.”