On June 8, 2015 Apple Inc. announced a new “News” app that will be included in the fall release of iOS 9, that is powered by Apple News Format™.

Fast forward to today, September 2, 2015 and Apple Inc. registers the following domain names with MarkMonitor:

• AppleNewsFormat.org
• AppleNewsPublisher.org
• News-Publisher.org
• NewsPublisher.org

All .org domain names.

The domain name AppleNewsFormat.com was registered on the day of the announcement (June 8, 2015), but not by Apple Inc.

According to whois records,  AppleNewsFormat.com, was registered at domain name registrar Hover.com (Tucows) by somebody under privacy protection.

Apple Inc. uses domain name registrar MarkMonitor.

Future UDRP?

AppleNewsPublisher.com was registered on June 24, 2015 at 1api.net by Heinz Abegglen of China and there is a full blown website on it relating to the News App!

Future UDRP?

News-Publisher.org and NewsPublisher.org are generic terms, so those two are different than the two mentioned above IMO.

Frank Schilling’s Name Administration Inc. is the current owner of the generic domain name NewsPublisher.com.

So the burning question would be… Why would Apple Inc. wait 87 days AFTER announcing Apple News Format / News app publicly and then try to register the matching domain names? Why not do it BEFORE announcing publicly? It may prevent some legal hassle, filing UDRP’s to secure the .com domain names if Apple Inc. wishes to have/use them? If they would have simply registered the domains prior to announcing publicly, that may have prevented the potential UDRP filing and would have been the logical thing to do IMO?

The good news for Apple, they do own the new gTLD domain name Apple.news, but it currently does not resolve. Another bad, they do not own AppleNews.com either, which is owned by publisher Ziff Davis Inc. of PcMag and the domain name redirects to http://www.pcmag.com/apple/

Apple was able to secure at least three .com domains that I could find as well today and those were: AppleNewsFormats.com and AppleWWWNewsPublisher.com

Another interesting domain name registration by Apple Inc. today, is wwwNewsPublisher.com . This can mean they are interested in purchasing the domain name NewsPublisher.com ? as wwwnewspublisher.com can be a typo domain name of NewsPublisher.com . The bad for Apple? A.) they do not own that domain as already mentioned and B.) they themselves have went after a www domain name holder in the past, wwwicloud.com via UDRP and won the domain name. Frank Schilling and Name Administration Inc. could file a UDRP against Apple for the wwwNewsPublisher.com domain name!

In the end, does Apple Inc. really need the domain names AppleNewsPublisher.com or AppleNewsFormat.com?

For use to make the app a success? IMO, no!

For brand protection, YES!

If Apple decided they needed to register domain names for brand protection or otherwise, why wait 87 days and spend the money to register the .org domains of each term?

It confuses me to say the least.

Of course Apple could go with just Apple.news which already has an Alexa Ranking of 14 Million although as I said it is not resolving which also makes no sense.

NewsPublisher.com will be one to keep an eye on though!