Recent Posts
- Drop-catcher drops almost all remaining registrars
- Another failing new gTLD stopped paying its dues
- ICANN found a zero-day hole in Adobe Connect
- Nominet to charge brands for no-name Whois access
- auDA may sue to delay boardroom bloodbath
- I just bought a new gTLD registry’s domain for $10
- Child abuse becoming big problem for new gTLDs
- Government gives auDA reform-or-die ultimatum
- Leaked memo alleges lavish travel spending at auDA
- dotFM offers $1.1 million stash of emoji domains
- Bling-maker kills off fifth dot-brand gTLD
- Now GNSO mulls emergency response to GDPR deadline
- auDA refers former directors to police
- CoCCA to charge trademark owners for Whois access
- Panic stations as Europe plays hardball on Whois privacy
- 101domain founder Wolfgang Reile dies at 67
- ICANN confirms GoDaddy Whois probe
- Grumpier Aussies call for more blood on the auDA boardroom floor
- Afilias scraps plan to scrap Whois
- auDA role “could have killed me” says resigning domainer
- Whois policy group closes down in face of GDPR
- Marby ponders emergency powers to avoid fragmented Whois
- 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
- Three more dot-brands throw in the towel
- 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
- CentralNic and KeyDrive in merger talks
- After long fight, Donuts adds .charity to its gTLD stable
- Lawyer: GoDaddy Whois changes a “critical” contract breach
- Now South Africa looks to second-level domain sales
- Next new gTLD round unlikely before 2022
- Donuts scraps 200 companies, consolidates under Binky Moon
- ICANNWiki fans protest funding cut
- Is ICANN still over-estimating revenue from “stagnating” gTLD industry?
- Community calls on ICANN to cut staff spending
- Amazon’s .amazon gTLD may not be dead just yet
- 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
Google buys .app for over $25 million
The fiercely competed new gTLD .app has sold to Google for a record-breaking $25 million.
The company’s Charleston Road Registry subsidiary beat out 12 other applicants for the string, including Donuts, Amazon, Famous Four Media, Radix and Afilias.
The auction lasted two days and fetched a winning bid of $25,001,000, more than any other new gTLD to date.
The previous high is believed to be .blog, which I estimate sold for less than $20 million.
Because it was an ICANN-run “last resort” auction, all of the money goes into ICANN’s special auction proceeds fund, which previously stood at just shy of $35 million.
Previous ICANN auctions have fetched prices between $600,000 and $6,760,000.
Google originally proposed .app as a closed registry in which only Google and its partners could register names.
However, after the Governmental Advisory Committee pressured ICANN to disallow “closed generics”, Google changed its application to enable anyone to register.
No doubt that Google has major plans for .app.
Well, the Government Advisory Committee may have pressured ICANN to disallow “closed generics” but it does not appear to have stopped Google sitting on “.app”. Nobody in Google appears to know when the tld will be released nor know anyone in Google who might know. I have written to ICANN but no response as yet!
To be fair, .app hasn’t been delegated and Google hasn’t even signed the contract yet. It’s still in the ICANN process.
I tried to be fair by contacting various relevant departments within Google to find out the situation. Unfortunately, nobody was able to help. Its not as if .app is of fringe interest. I also wrote to ICANN and got no response. I know Google is a big organisation and all that, but they do promote spread of information and it seemed suspicious that they did not explain the situation to their own staff. Anyway, thank you for your comment.
Just FYI, Google has now signed its ICANN contract.
So where to next? How do I find out where, when and how I can register a .app domain name?
When Google launches .app, it will no doubt announce it.
Google may need time to extract all the domains they might ever find a use for!
Well, we are 7 months on now and still no signs of the “.app” TLD. I guess Google can get away with it because they are Google and paid ICANN a lot of money.
All registries can postpone their launch indefinitely.
Exactly. As far as I can establish, you can only complain to ICANN on the basis of some breach of registry specification 11: Public Interest Commitments. Surprise, surprise, it is not a public interest commitment to launch a tld within any specified period. So Google can, and probably will, sit on the .app ltd indefinitely. I’d be interested to know which particular public’s interest that might be. It stinks.