Medistry, the .med registry with a really strange business model, is looking to normalize its practices and start competing with the cluster of healthcare-related gTLDs already on the market.
The gTLD launched in 2016 and had almost 42,000 domains under management at the last count, which may sound like a pretty decent showing for a 2012-round niche registry (comparable to the likes of .beauty and .chat).
But there are a few caveats. For starters, only one non-registry .med domain has been indexed by Google, and it redirects to a .com web site.
Delve into the .med zone file, and you’ll discover that almost all of those 42,000 domains are 12 characters long and each comprises entirely numbers and hyphens. Doesn’t sound very sexy, does it?
Furthermore, delve into the Whois, and you’ll discover that all of those domains are registered via the registry’s in-house registrar, Name Share, to an entity affiliated with the registry itself.
A couple of years ago, having not sold more than a handful of .med domain names (I’ll get to the reasons for that in a moment), Medistry seems to have decided to reinvent .med as a directory for medicines.
In the US, all human medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration are given a National Drug Code, a 10-digit unique identifier that the manufacturers are required to print on the packaging.
So, the domain name 55150-250-50.med refers to a bupivacaine hydrochloride injection, a surgical anaesthetic made by Eugia US LLC. Almost all .med domains follow this three-part NDC structure.
The domains seem to have been registered in service of Trust.med, another entity affiliated with the registry, which says it offers supply chain management services to the US healthcare industry.
Why the DNS is the best place to store this NDC information isn’t clear to me. All the .med names I checked came back NXDOMAIN and were marked as pendingDelete in the Whois despite being months away from expiration.
So… Plan C? Sell .med domains to any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants one, on a first-come, first-served basis.
Medistry says that, as of now:
A registrant of a .med domain name can be an individual or organization. All available domain names in .med are approved for registration on a first come, first serve basis through .med accredited registrars. .med domain names can also be purchased in the domain name aftermarket.
That’s hell and gone from the mission outlined in Medistry’s 2012 new gTLD application and its current Registry Agreement with ICANN, both of which outline some of the harshest registration restrictions of any TLD.
Its current ICANN contract states, in the Public Interest Commitments:
The lone method of domain name allocation in the TLD will be by Request for Proposal (RFP) under guidelines, rules and criteria as set forth by the Advisory Board in its sole discretion.
RFP for domain name registration in the TLD will be reviewed for approval by the Advisory Board, in its sole discretion, independent of Registry Operator.
PICs are enforceable by ICANN Compliance under the rarely used PIC Dispute Resolution Process, should there be a view that a registry is violating the contract.
Could Medistry be heading into stormy waters with Compliance? The company does have form in that regard — it’s owned by the same people who run .jobs registry Employ Media.
Employ Media got into a protracted fight with ICANN in 2012 over a service called Universe.jobs, which saw it register 40,000 generic .jobs domains to a close partner in order to turn the gTLD into a structured taxonomical jobs board.
ICANN thought the service was a breach of the .jobs RA and the two parties ended up in arbitration. ICANN eventually let Universe.jobs go ahead but it fizzled out a few years later when Employ Media came to blows with its partner.
Is history repeating itself with .med’s sudden change of business model?
Medistry says that full general availability for .med names will begin on September 2, but it’s telling registrars (pdf) they can “Pre-Register any domain to guarantee registration beginning on September 2” by emailing them a list of names.
It’s also looking to on-board more registrars. As of the end of January, the only registrars to ever sell a .med domain were owned by the registry. It uses Nominet as its back-end.
.med would compete against the likes of .doctor, .surgery, .health and .clinic.
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