Recent Posts
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Amazon and Google to fight over .kids at auction
Amazon, Google and a third applicant are scheduled to fight for control of the new gTLDs .kid or .kids at auction.
It’s the first ICANN gTLD auction to be scheduled since a Verisign puppet paid $135 million for .web in July 2016.
According to ICANN documentation, .kid and .kids will go to auction January 25, 2018.
The winning bid will be added to ICANN’s quarter-billion-dollar stash of auction proceeds, rather than shared out between the applicants.
Even though two different strings are at stake, it will be a so-called “direct contention” auction, meaning only .kids or .kid will ultimately go live.
Google, the sole applicant for .kid, had filed String Confusion Objections against .kids applications from Amazon and DotKids Foundation and won both, meaning the three applications were lumped into the same contention set.
Unless DotKids has a secret sugar daddy, it seems probable that the internet will next year either get a .kid gTLD operated by Google or a .kids gTLD operated by Amazon.
DotKids had applied as a “community” application and attempted to shut out both rivals and avoid an auction by requesting a Community Priority Evaluation.
However, it comprehensively lost the CPE.
Child-friendly domain spaces have a poor track record, partly due to the extra restrictions registrants must agree to, and are unlikely to be high-volume gTLDS no matter who wins.
Neustar operated .kids.us for 10 years, following US legislation, but turned it off in 2012 after fewer than 100 web sites used the domain. It made the decision not to reintroduce it in 2015.
The Russian-language equivalent, .дети, has been live for over three years but has only around 1,000 domains in its zone file.
The .kids/.kid auction may not go ahead if the three applicants privately negotiate a deal soon, but they’ve had over a year to do so already and have apparently failed to come to an agreement.
Amazon and Google both have large inventories of not launched TLDs, meaning they don’t see new TLDs as ripe yet. My bet is on this auction going for a relatively small winning bid.
Thanks for sharing.
I am very optimistic about the future of new generic top-level domain names, for example, top, but I think there is still a long way to go for new top-level domains.