Recent Posts
- Second-level .au names delayed
- ICANN names new directors, replaces Facebook exec
- After getting acquired, bank scraps its dot-brand
- Porn-block retail prices revealed. Wow.
- Registrars could be held liable for US gun violence
- Three-letter .com owned by hospital “hijacked”
- “We’re Irish!” claim Brits as .eu shrinks yet again
- Mystery .vu registry revealed
- Berkens says new gTLDs mostly suck but geos suck hardest
- .gay gets rooted
- Neustar takes control of two new gTLDs
- Epik will sponsor 8chan’s domain, but will not host its site
- EFF becomes second to appeal new .org contract
- CentralNic to pay $3.4 million for iwantmyname
- Google has big, innovative plans for .new
- Amazon and Google have been BEATEN by a non-profit in the fight for .kids
- After more racist shootings, take one guess which registrar 8chan just switched to
- Radix releases huge amount of premium domain data
- ICANN dumps the “Whois” in new Whois tool
- Now auDA loses its CEO too
- Porn blocks could be worth millions to MMX
- Cryptocurrency firms to be banned from .bank
- Cybersquatting cases down a bit in the UK
- Looks like .fans has a new Chinese owner
- Can NameCheap reverse .org price cap scrap?
- Neustar to keep .us for another decade
- MMX to pay $5.1 million to get out of terrible .london deal
- ZADNA boss canned for “misconduct”
- ICANN’s new conferencing software has a webcam security bug
- ICANN explains how .org pricing decision was made
- CEO lost millions on Manhattan apartment deal just days before AlpNames went dark
- Zimbabwe wants to rebuild its domain market from scratch
- Net 4 India gets brief reprieve from ICANN suspension
- Luxembourg tops 100,000 .lu domains
- China domain smaller than expected
- Charities “could move to .ngo” if .org prices rise
- Airline hit with $230 million GDPR fine
- After five-year wait, .madrid domains coming this month
- Foreigners mostly speak foreign, ccTLD study finds
- .icu joins the million-domains club in one year, but spam triples
- Cloudflare “bug” reveals hundreds of secret domain prices
- .org now has no price caps, but “no specific plans” to raise prices
- CentralNic boosts reseller biz with $11.3 million Hexonet buy
- What happens in Vegas… gets released in .vegas
- ICANN gives .bj to Jeny
- 1.8 million UK grandfathers die after Nominet deadline hits
- .amazon frozen AGAIN as endless government games continue
- Afilias buys the other half of .global
- What time is it? For ICANN, even that can be a controversial question
- auDA reveals cut-off date for 2LD priority
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.