Recent Posts
- Web.com in takeover talks – report
- After price hike, now Tucows drops support for Uniregistry TLDs
- Country names to finally be released in new gTLDs
- Want to be one of the internet’s SEVEN SECRET KEY-HOLDERS? Apply now!
- Richemont kills off two more dot-brands
- Iran reported to Ombudsman after new gTLD conspiracy theory
- Key-Systems buys reseller EDC
- Let’s all have a nosey at how much ICANN staff get paid
- Massive ransomware attack hits 150 countries, brought down by a domain reg
- ICANN’s origin story is well worth a watch
- Neustar’s .au deal in peril as Aussies look in-house
- .gay, .music and others in limbo as ICANN probes itself
- XYZ acquires .storage, its 10th gTLD
- ICANN changes Panama meeting dates to avoid Muslim holiday
- More change at the top at Donuts as Tindal steps down
- Second emergency registry tested with dead dot-brand
- MMX stung for $7.7 million by crappy .london contract?
- Hey, you! Listen to the ICANN board webcast more private sessions
- MarkMonitor tells .feedback to take a hike after “breach” claim
- ICANN attendance shrank in Denmark
- Afnic CEO quits, heads to new mystery job
- Verisign to keep price increase power under new .net contract
- ICANN loosens Whois privacy rules for registrars
- Pirate Bay founder launches piracy-friendly domain privacy service
- IANA boss quits ICANN
- Mystery buyer pumps $500,000 into MMX gTLDs
- Uniregistry and Neustar have TLDs approved in China
- .club premium sales approaching $5 million
- Chinese to invade .africa? CEO thinks so
- Companies losing $10 BILLION by ignoring new gTLDs — report
- .feedback threatens to shut off MarkMonitor
- Now new gTLDs are being scapegoated for child abuse material (rant)
- Uniregistry to grandfather existing domains before big price increases
- PIR promotes two senior execs
- China approves more Donuts, Afilias gTLDs
- ICANN reveals $500 million gTLD buyback program
- New gTLD registries want a $17 million ICANN rebate
- Hacker hostage crisis at ICANN secret key ceremony! (on TV)
- DENIC approved as ICANN escrow agent
- .feedback gTLD in breach of contract after big brand “fraud” claims
- Government anger over two-letter domains
- Schilling expects GoDaddy to return after dumping Uniregistry gTLDs
- In rare public session, ICANN approves sexual harassment policy
- Schneider quits as chair of GAC
- Papac named ICANN’s first complaints officer
- Schilling: big price increases needed to keep new gTLDs alive
- CentralNic says revenue more than doubled in 2016
- How .com became a restricted TLD
- Nominet gets new chair
- Verisign report deletes millions of domains from history
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.