Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry withdrew applications for two new gTLD’s today reflected on ICANN’s site.

The application were for .Media and .Country

Both of these application were due to have Initial Evaluation by ICANN released tomorrow as they had prioritization numbers 1,242 and 1,232 respectively so by withdrawing tonight Uniregistry picks up a 70% refund instead of the 35% it would have been entitled to after tomorrow.

The withdrawal of Uniregistry application for .Country is an outgrowth of the Joint Venture to operate this new gTLD between Uniregistry and Top Level Domain Holdings (TLDH) the companies announced in April.

There are only two other applicants for .Media, Tucows.com and Donuts.’

We reached out to Mr. Schilling who had this to day about the withdrawn applications:

“”While Uniregistry does not believe in the legitimacy of so-called “private auctions”, we are open to exploring joint ventures, which allow us to lower costs and improve our product offering in a pro-competitive manner, for the registrants of the future. I would expect any withdrawals of our applications to follow that meme going forward.”

So its seems that its application for .Media may have been dropped in a deal with  one of the other applicants.

Uniregistry originally applied for 54 new gTLD’s and has now withdrawn 3 applications.

Uniregistry previously withdrew an application for .Marketing

This marks the 100th and 101st new gTLD applications to be withdrawn from ICANN.