Recent Posts
- Has the world’s biggest new gTLD registry gone bankrupt?
- $44 billion company is latest deadbeat gTLD registry
- How ICANN thinks YOU could get full Whois access
- After ICANN nod, MMX buys .xxx
- Donuts buys back .fan, ignores plural .fans
- Domainers could lose their names as .au loophole closes
- In GDPR case, ICANN ready to fight Tucows to the bitter end
- Three-letter .net leads as NamesCon charity auction raises €4,150 for Kenyan school
- Atallah encourages domainers to get involved in ICANN
- US asks if it should take back control over ICANN
- Christians rail against GoDaddy’s six-color gay rights flag
- Can’t get enough GDPR? Come to my NamesCon panel
- Court denies ICANN’s GDPR injunction against Tucows
- Million-euro Tucows GDPR lawsuit may not be ICANN’s last
- How all 33 European ccTLDs are handling GDPR
- After outcry, ICANNWiki to get ICANN funding next year
- ICANN slashes new gTLD income forecast AGAIN
- Sedo’s cunning GDPR workaround
- ICANN board talking GDPR “litigation”
- Failure to launch: 10 years-old gTLDs that are still dormant
- EnCirca partners with PandoraBots to push .bot names to brands
- Donuts freezes .place gTLD ahead of new geofencing rules
- Registrars want six-month stay on new Whois policy
- Lauded domainer arrested over $2.4 million “extortion”
- Domainers not welcome in this Whois database
- ICANN approves messy, unfinished Whois policy
- Three reasons ICANN could swing the GDPR ban hammer on day one
- New gTLD registries get $6 million refund
- Cute abruptly quits PIR
- No, I don’t get what’s going on with GDPR either
- Whois working group imploding in GDPR’s wake
- Have your say on single-character .com domains
- NamesCon dumps the Trop, eyeing beaches for 2020
- CentralNic now managing failing .fan and .fans
- CIRA has a record year for regs
- MMX rejected three takeover bids before buying .xxx
- ICANN flips off governments over Whois privacy
- 101domain founders suing Afilias over unpaid $1 million after $15.5 million acquisition
- MMX could announce acquisition this week
- Google’s .app gTLD beats .porn to biggest sunrise yet
- Van Gelder remembered in GNSO resolution
- $55 billion bank not paying its $6,250 ICANN fees
- ICANN cancels registrar audit as GDPR headaches loom
- Iceland breaks ranks on Whois, will publish emails
- auDA wins brief reprieve from boardroom battle
- .com adds 5.5 million names, renewals back over 70%
- Muslim world still thinks .islam isn’t kosher
- Drop-catcher drops almost all remaining registrars
- Another failing new gTLD stopped paying its dues
- ICANN found a zero-day hole in Adobe Connect
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.