Recent Posts
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- Government gives auDA reform-or-die ultimatum
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- Now GNSO mulls emergency response to GDPR deadline
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- 101domain founder Wolfgang Reile dies at 67
- ICANN confirms GoDaddy Whois probe
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- Afilias scraps plan to scrap Whois
- auDA role “could have killed me” says resigning domainer
- Whois policy group closes down in face of GDPR
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- ICANN heads to Mar-a-Lago for budget crisis talks
- Registrars will miss GDPR deadline by a mile
- ICANN chief begs privacy watchdogs for Whois advice
- Stéphane Van Gelder dies after motorcycle accident
- Some men at ICANN meetings really are assholes
- Cybersquatting cases up because of .com
- Privacy could be a million-dollar business for ICANN
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- Is ICANN over-reacting to Whois privacy law?
- Now Latvia guts Whois to comply with GDPR
- A lazy blogger’s wish-list for ICANN remote participation
- Portugal joins the million-domain club
- Austria to stop publishing most Whois data
- Data leak security glitch screws up ICANN 61 for thousands
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- Lawyer: GoDaddy Whois changes a “critical” contract breach
- Now South Africa looks to second-level domain sales
- Next new gTLD round unlikely before 2022
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- ICANNWiki fans protest funding cut
- Is ICANN still over-estimating revenue from “stagnating” gTLD industry?
- Community calls on ICANN to cut staff spending
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- Namecheap’s Move Your Domain Day actually works
- ICANN mulls $68 million raid on auction war chest
- ICANN strikes back at “offensive” .gay bidder
- Namecheap accuses GoDaddy of delaying transfers
- Tech giants gunning for AlpNames over new gTLD “abuse”
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- Industry report show slightly stronger growth than Verisign’s
- Google’s $25 million .app domain finally has a launch date
- Whois privacy will soon be free for most domains
.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!