Recent Posts
- DI Leaders Roundtable #1 — How many new gTLDs will be applied for next time around?
- Now you don’t have to live in the EU to register a .eu domain, but there’s a catch
- Spam is not our problem, major domain firms say ahead of ICANN 66
- Crunch time, again, for Whois access policy
- Google quietly launches .new domains sunrise
- After .org price outrage, ICANN says it has NOT scrapped public comments
- Hindu god smites Chrysler gTLD
- Top ICANN advisor Tarek Kamel dies at 57
- Three big changes could be coming to .uk
- Introducing… the DI Leaders Roundtable
- After killing the cows, what does the new Tucows logo remind you of?
- Radix acquires another gTLD
- .whoswho survives!
- Correction: the 10 most-used dot-brands
- Nominet raises .uk prices
- Registrar suspended over dodgy transfers
- Mediocre .vote gTLD drops restrictions
- ICANN’s babysitting fund goes live
- Claims auDA boss quit after he was busted for “falsified” law degree
- .bond domains could cost a grand each
- PIR’s “new” .org domain is just temporary. Help it pick another new one!
- MMX switches porn TLDs from Afilias to Uniregistry
- Argentina will use a lottery to decide 2LD landrush
- Sixty gTLD registries not monitoring security threats
- ICANN must do more to fight internet security threats [Guest Post]
- Bumper batch of dot-brands off themselves for Friday 13th
- .org price cap complaints more like “spam” says Ombudsman
- Botterman is new ICANN chair
- Another victory for Amazon as ICANN rejects Colombian appeal
- Kafka turns in grave as ICANN crowbars “useless” Greek TLD into the root
- Sorry, you still can’t sue ICANN, two-faced .africa bidder told
- Why you should never let a pizza joint apply for your billion-dollar dot-brand
- More than 1,000 new gTLDs a year? Sure!
- Paranoid ICANN opens another root server in China
- A third of the top TLDs are shrinking
- These two ccTLDs drove two thirds of all domain growth in Q2
- .blog registry handover did NOT go smoothly
- Donuts slashes prices on a million domains
- .tech gTLD startups “raise $2 billion”
- Whois killer deadline has passed. Did most registrars miss it?
- CIRA replaces CORE as emergency backup registry
- The Amazon is burning. Is this good news for .amazon?
- China’s MySpace trainwreck sells its gTLD
- 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
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.