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Could new gTLD auctions last until April 2016?

Kevin Murphy, November 26, 2013, 12:21:34 (UTC), Domain Registries

April 2016. That’s the likely date of the final new gTLD contention set auction under the rules currently anticipated by ICANN.
As you might imagine, many applicants are not happy about this.
In a series of presentations over the last couple of weeks, ICANN has laid out how it sees its “last resort” auctions playing out.
Preliminary timetables have been sketched out, from which three data points are noteworthy:

  • Auctions will start in “early March” 2014.
  • There will be one “auction event” every four weeks.
  • Applicants can bid on a maximum of five gTLDs per auction.

Currently, the applicant in the most contention sets is Donuts, as you might have guessed given the size of its portfolio. By my reckoning it’s currently contesting 141 gTLD strings.
With a March 1 date for the first auction, and taking into account the aforementioned timing restrictions, it would be April 23, 2016 before the final Donuts contention set is resolved.
That’s four years after the application window closed.
Google would be in auctions until January 2015. TLDH, Uniregistry and Amazon’s contested strings would be tied up until at least October next year.
This is obviously terrible news for applicants competing with portfolio applicants where the contention set has quite a high position in ICANN’s prioritization queue.
A year or two is a long time to wait — burning through your funding and not taking in any revenue — if you’re a single-string applicant on a tight budget. Every dollar spent waiting is a dollar less to spend at auction.
According to ICANN, applicants will be able to waive the five-gTLDs-per-month maximum.
But that only seems to help the larger portfolio applicants, which will be seeing revenue from launched, uncontested gTLDs and could take the opportunity to starve out their smaller rivals.
Auctions themselves are shaping up to be a controversial subject in general, with several community members taking the mic at the ICANN 48 Public Forum last week to call for ICANN to change the process.
A few people pointed the ICANN board to the recent withdrawal of DotGreen — a popular but evidently poorly funded community effort — from the new gTLD program as a harbinger of things to come.
“By not allowing applicants to be in more than five auctions simultaneously it means those applicants, particularly portfolio applicants, are not going to be able to move through their contention sets,” Google policy manager Sarah Falvey said at the Forum.
“It drags in all the single applicants, because they’re stuck on that exact same time schedule and can’t move their applications through as well,” she said, adding that ICANN should create a new process that sets the time limit for auctions at about six months.
“People could be waiting two years to delegate through no fault of their own,” she said.
Later responding to Afilias director Jonathan Robinson, who backed up Falvey’s call for an accelerated schedule, ICANN president of generic domains Akram Atallah said that the rules are not yet set in stone.
The five-a-day rule was created to give applicants the ability to plan payments better, he said, and ICANN is still soliciting input on how the system could be improved.

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Comments (5)

  1. Phil Buckingham says:
    November 26, 2013 at 5:47 pm

    One solution could be for ICANN to allow,any single registry TLD up to say 10 TLDs in a portfolio, to withdraw and elect a change request to fast track a new application / string.
    As an overall contention set strategy ICANN last resort auctions remains just that, as losers in a contention set string get nothing back. A value prop pre private auction scenario still remains a far better alternative.
    Funding and $millions for auction deposits required are huge headaches looming for all contention set players.
    We provide models,strategic valuations,source investment, funding advice.

    Reply
    • Rubens Kuhl says:
      November 26, 2013 at 9:43 pm

      New applications and/or new strings would require a new objections phase, which I don’t think the community would like doing at this point…

      Reply
  2. Joe Zane says:
    November 26, 2013 at 9:08 pm

    ICANN really seems to want to push people to the Applicant Auction…
    http://buenosaires48.icann.org/en/video/wrap-22nov13-en
    They talk about auctions starting at 5:45.

    Reply
  3. Kassey says:
    November 26, 2013 at 10:18 pm

    “The five-a-day rule” or is it five gTLDs per month?

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      November 26, 2013 at 10:37 pm

      It’s five per auction. My understanding is that it’s one auction per month, and that each auction happens in one day. Hence: five-a-day.

      Reply

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