Recent Posts
- The internet is still working after KSK roll
- Donuts loses to ICANN in $135 million .web auction appeal
- ICANN says it can spend quarter-billion-dollar auction fund however it likes
- Google abandons its .kid gTLD bid
- ICANN number two Atallah is new CEO of Donuts
- ICANN blocks .islam after government veto
- Nominet to donate over $260,000 to Children In Need
- CentralNic buys .fans for peanuts
- Is auDA’s new marketing windfall working?
- Google adds censorship workaround to Android devices
- Spammy .loan makes Alibaba fastest-growing and fastest-shrinking registrar in June
- Here’s what ICANN’s boss is saying about Whois access now
- Parsons quits GoDaddy board
- Brazil dancing around four million reg milestone
- Donuts says DPML now covers “millions” of trademark variants as price rockets again
- Chinese registrars on the decline
- $3.2 million-a-year registrar up for grabs
- It’s Drazek vs Dammak for GNSO Council chair
- Cloudflare selling all domains at cost: “All we’re doing is pinging an API”
- MMX waving goodbye to .london? Boss puts focus on renewal profits, China
- Emoji domains now easier to use
- Chutzpah alert! DotKids wants ICANN handout to fight gTLD auction
- Afilias gets Guinness record for .au migration
- KSK vote was NOT unanimous
- ICANN turns 20 today (or maybe not)
- Van der Laan to leave ICANN board
- Set buttocks to clench! ICANN approves risky KSK rollover
- Mediators hired as Whois reformers butt heads
- US scraps fucking stupid “seven dirty words” ban
- Beginning of the end for DomainTools? Court orders it to scrub Whois records
- PIR chief: registries should stop stressing about volume
- .CLUB sees spam double after China promotion
- Com Laude acquires Scottish rival
- CentralNic acquired yet another company
- Empty Whois a threat to the US elections?
- Donuts gets bought by former ICANN CEO’s firm
- .tel’s second-biggest registrar gets canned
- Whois privacy did NOT increase spam volumes
- Afilias finally admits it’s American
- Could a new US law make GDPR irrelevant?
- No more free ride for ICANN Fellows?
- Afilias sues India to block $12 million Neustar back-end deal
- More consolidation? Endurance said to be up for sale
- ICANN faces critical choice as security experts warn against key rollover
- .CLUB revenue not all that
- Microsoft seizes “Russian election hacking” domains
- New gTLDs rebound in Q2
- .CLUB revenue reportedly $7.2 million
- How a single Whois complaint got this registrar shitcanned
- 38th dot-brand bows out after acquisition
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.