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Looks like .music is finally on its way
The hard-fought battle for .music appears to be over.
I’m not yet in a position to tell you which of the eight applicants for the new gTLD has been successful, but I can tell you some of those who were not.
Two applicants have this week withdrawn their bids, an almost certain sign that the contention set has been privately settled.
The first applicant to ditch its bid was dot Music Ltd, an application vehicle of Domain Venture Partners (we used to call this outfit Famous Four Media, but that’s changed).
The other is .music LLC, also known as Far Further.
We can almost certainly expect all but one of the remaining applicants to withdraw their applications over the coming days.
Applicants typically sign NDAs when they settle contention privately, usually via an auction.
Far Further was one of two unsuccessful “community” applicants for .music. It had the backing of dozens of music trade groups, including the influential Recording Industry Association of America. Even Radiohead’s guitarist chipped in with his support.
Evidently, none of these groups were prepared to fund Far Further to the extent it could win the .music contention set.
The .music contention set has been held up by the continuing protestations of the other community applicant, DotMusic Limited, the company run by long-time .music cheerleader Constantinos Roussos.
After DotMusic lost its Community Priority Evaluation in 2016, on the basis that the “community” was pretty much illusory under ICANN rules, it started to complain that the process was unfair.
The applicant immediately filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN.
.music then found itself one of several proposed gTLDs frozen while ICANN conducted an outside review of alleged irregularities in the CPE process.
That review found no impropriety in early 2018, a verdict DotMusic’s lawyer dismissed as a “whitewash”.
It has since stalled the process several times with requests for information under ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy, and more RfRs when those requests were denied.
But this series of appeals finally came to an end March 14, when ICANN’s board of directors finally ruled against DotMusic’s 2016 RfR.
That appears to have opened up the .music set for private resolution.
So who won? I don’t know yet, but the remaining applicants are: DotMusic itself, Google, Amazon, MMX, Donuts and Radix.
There are certainly two very deep-pocketed companies on that list. Could we be looking at Google or Amazon as the new proprietors of .music?
If either of those companies has won, prospective registrants might find they have a long wait before they can pick up a .music domain. Neither of these giants has a track record of rushing its new gTLDs to market.
If the victor is a conventional gTLD registry, we’d very probably be looking at a launch in 2019.
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