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.baby and .mls fetch over $3 million each
ICANN and Power Auctions have completed December’s mini-batch of “last resort” new gTLD auctions, adding a total of $6.4 million to its mysterious auction cash pile.
Johnson & Johnson won .baby, fighting off five portfolio applicants and paying a winning bid of $3,088,888.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Real Estate Association beat Afilias to .mls, paying $3,359,000.
I called it for CREA earlier this week, noting that the organization wanted .mls enough that it filed two applications, a failed Community Priority Evaluation, and an unsuccessful Legal Rights Objection against Afilias.
ICANN has now raised over $34 million selling off 10 strings at last resort auctions, with prices ranging from $600,000 (.信息) to $6.7 million (.tech).
The money has been set aside for purposes currently undecided. At least one applicant wants ICANN to redistribute the cash to losing bidders, which I don’t think is particularly likely.
Since MLS also stands for major league soccer, will this extension also be limited to members of the real estate community like .realtor, or will it be open others?
ICANN should allocated the majority of the money to support all of the new domain extensions coming to market via an international awareness campaign.
To simply take high application fees and annual fees, institute overbearing regulations, and cause costly delays would be a disservice to the whole program.
If ICANN truly wants to support innovation and competition in the name space they need to let the world know that the new domain extensions exist. Ironically, if they invested the funds to support the new TLDs it would actually support their longterm revenue streams.
Could only agree with you about this. ICANN’s actions seems very defensive, I wonder why.
It was not just CREA behind .mls:
http://realtormag.realtor.org/daily-news/2014/12/19/mls-domain-expand-internet-real-estate
https://twitter.com/dotmls/status/546027510627336192
“.MLS domains will NOT be available for real estate use within the U.S. under deal among @dotMLS, NAR, and CREA”
So, thru 3 different applicants, NAR secured .realestate, .mls and .realtor, and decided which TLD serves which market.
And here I just made a year-end tax-deductible donation to the campaign to fight MLS.
Doh!