.pet

Status:	Delegated
country:	International
Registry:	Afilias
Registry Backend:	Afilias
Type:	Generic
Category:	Lifestyle
Priority #:	1229 - Google (Charleston Road Registry Inc.) 1529 - Afilias
nTLDStats
Registrations:	12,192
Parked Domains:	8,261
Parked Domain %:	67.76 %
Important Dates
Delegation:	26 July 2015
General Availability:	23 February 2016
More Information:

.pet is a delegated TLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program. Afilias manages the TLD and is its Registry. The proposed application succeeded and was delegated to the Root Zone on 26 July, 2015.

Applicant

1. Afilias

Previous Applicant

1. Google (Charleston Road Registry Inc.)

String Confusion Objection

Google submitted a String Confusion Objection to the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) (a division of the AAA) on March 13, 2013, asserting that .pet and .pets are confusingly similar. .pets' only applicant is Donuts, but a ruling by Richard Page of the ICDR that agrees with objection may put Donuts into the same contention set with current .pet applicants Google and Afilias. This ruling came as a surprise as similar String Confusion Objections for .hotel vs. .hotels and .car vs. .cars did not find the plural form of the strings to be confusingly similar. A second panelist agreed with Google's objection in a report published on September 19, 2013.

Private auction

On the 8th December 2014, it was reported that Afilias had won the right to run .pet after Google withdrew its application for .pet and Donuts withdrew its bid for pets. This was the first time a private auction had been used to settle a new GTLD contention set containing two different strings.