.CO.COM Partners With CentralNic To Beat New gTLDs To The Starting Line

co-com-centralnic

This week .CO.COM and CentralNic announced a partnership that will allow the new TLD to leap ahead of most gTLDs that will be tied up in the ICANN approval process. .CO.COM is planning to have a Sunrise Period for Trademark holders in late February followed by a Landrush Period shortly thereafter.

If you haven’t heard of .CO.COM yet you definitely know the people behind it. As I’ve said many times before it takes a great team to build a great company and .CO.COM has some of the best, most experienced people in our industry behind it. It all started with Paul Goldstone, the owner of one of the top 2L .COM’s on the planet, .CO.COM. Paul had a vision to really do something meaningful with this domain and he decided to go beyond selling it, and instead choose to open it up as a new TLD for anyone to register.

As many of you know Ken Hansen left his long-time post at Neustar to take the CEO position at CO.COM and none other than Gregg McNair (GGG to most of you) came on as Chairman. To be perfectly honest it all reminds me of when Miami Heat assembled their “Dream Team” and now the final pice has been put into place with this newly forged CentralNic partnership.

“The co.com team includes an impressive line-up of domain industry experts. Any registry service provider would be excited to support this new domain extension, and we at CentralNic are delighted to have been awarded this contract.” (Ben Crawford, CEO CentralNic)

As I said above and in the title of this post, .CO.COM is going to beat most new gTLDs to the starting line with a Landrush that is on track to open in Q4 of this year. Given CentralNic’s massive distribution network we’re only a few months away from seeing .CO.COM available at registrars around the world.

I am incredibly excited for Paul, Ken and Gregg as they move forward. As usual I’ll be watching and keeping all of you in the loop!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton