HTC Terminates its .Brand domain .HTC

Last month, McDonalds dumped its .brand top level domain names .McDonalds and .MCD, HTC the phone company has joined a growing list of new gTLD applicants who have opted to terminate registry agreements. HTC is now the 27th .brand owner to kill its gtld.

The $4.3 billion-a-year Taiwanese HTC wrote to ICANN on  May 8 2017 and this has been published this July. The phone maker told ICANN that it no longer wishes to run .htc as a dot-brand registry.

“The restaurant chain applied to run the .McDonalds and .MCD top level domain names, but it recently sent termination notices (pdf) to domain name overseer ICANN voluntarily relinquishing the two domains.

The 2nd May termination letter that was recently published by ICANN, not only asked that McDonald’s relinquishes control of the .McDonalds and .MCD TLDs, but also asked that .McDonalds not be delegated to a successor registry operator for two years. Its only live website is attached to the .McDonalds TLD page at nic.mcdonalds that describes the fast food chain’s policies. ICANN has also just published a termination notice from Pampered Chef, a Berkshire Hathaway company, for .PamperedChef.