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Actually that’s not true. In 2017 .wed (with real customers) gTLD ceased operation and was taken over by ICANN under the EBERO program. http://domainincite.com/

• CydeWeys 5y ago
  Ah interesting, I'd forgotten about that. A grand total of 40 domains were transferred through the EBERO process (note: they didn't experience interruption). I do like this quote from the article: > In this case, ICANN said that Atgron had failed to provide Whois services as required by contract. The threshold for Whois triggering EBERO is 24 hours downtime over a week. > However, the situation looks to me a lot more like a business failure than a technical failure. > Multiple sources with knowledge of the transition tell me that the Whois was turned off deliberately, purely to provide a triggering event for the EBERO failover system, after Atgron’s back-end contract with CoCCA expired. > The logic was that turning off Whois would be far less disruptive for registrants and internet users than losing DNS resolution, DNSSEC, data escrow or EPP. It sounds like they creatively used EBERO as the most expedient method to be able to cease hosting .wed, which they had been unprofitable to them owing to the mere 40 total registrations that they had. And they did so in a way that would minimally disrupt their users. Overall, seeing that EBERO was successfully used strengthens my confidence in the overall safety of new gTLDs. There's way too many of them out there, and they're way too important now as a whole, for anyone to simply just let them vanish out from underneath their users.