.shop gTLD sells for record $41.5 million

The nine-way fight for the .shop gTLD has raised $41.5 million at auction.
It’s the most-expensive reported new gTLD sale to date.
The victor was GMO Registry of Japan, which runs a few Asian geographic gTLDs and acts as service provider for over a dozen dot-brands.
GMO wanted .shop so badly it actually applied twice for the gTLD in the 2012 application round.
Only two bidders, GMO and an unidentified rival, were prepared to pay over $15 million, according to ICANN.
The previous record-holder for an ICANN gTLD auction was .app, which Google bought for a smidgen over $25 million last February.
Dozens of contention sets have “self resolved” via private auction, but the winning bids of those are typically not disclosed.
According to GMO’s .shop application, .shop will be an open, unrestricted namespace. The company seems to be planning to sell value-added e-commerce services in addition to domain names.
But domainers will not be welcome in the gTLD. GMO’s application reads:

Registration of a .SHOP domain name solely for the purpose of selling, exchanging, trading, leasing the domain name shall be deemed as inappropriate use or intent.

The company plans to do random spot checks to make sure no registrants are breaking this rule.
GMO is using CentralNic as its back-end registry services software provider, following a 2013 deal.
Radix, Famous Four, Donuts, Google, Amazon, 2000-round applicant Commercial Connect and a company called Beijing Jingdong 360 had all applied for .shop.
But according to ICANN only seven of the original applicants qualified for the auction.
One of the drop-outs was GMO itself. The company has actually applied for .shop twice — once as a regular applicant and once as a “community”.
The non-community application was the one that participated in the auction.
Unsuccessful community applicant Commercial Connect, which has been fighting for .shop since first applying for it in 2000, also did not participate.
On Tuesday, it filed a futile Request for Reconsideration (pdf) with ICANN, complaining about the fact that it lost its Community Priority Evaluation.
.shop was originally linked to .shopping, due to a badly decided String Similarity Objection, but that contention set was resolved separately by Donuts and Uniregistry last week.

GoDaddy launches mobile app for investors

GoDaddy has launched a new mobile device app specifically for domain investors.
GoDaddy Investor, as it is called, will enable domainers to monitor watch-lists of expiring domains, as well as bid in and track auctions, the company said.
Authentication is handled via a special PIN system or, on iOS, Apple’s TouchID.
“We worked closely with our domain investors to bring the same great investing experience to mobile that they’ve enjoyed on desktop for years,” Paul Nicks, GoDaddy’s senior director of aftermarket, said in a press release.
The app is available for Android and iOS operating systems and is available via their respective app stores.

Rightside to auction “xyz” domains at NamesCon

.xyz made a bit of a splash with domain investors in 2015, but is the meaningless string “xyz” inherently attractive? Even at the second level?
Rightside seems to think so.
The registry, which does not operate .xyz, is planning to auction at least four “xyz” domains during next Monday’s live auction at the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.
Rightside today disclosed that xyz.sale, xyz.market, xyz.news and xyz.live will be among about a dozen registry-reserved short domain names– such as q.sale and z.pub — it will attempt to sell.
The only meaningful domain on its list is the absolutely fantastic, category-killing viral.video.
It’s difficult to see the “xyz” names as anything other than attempt to cash in on the popularity of .xyz domains among the investors, many of them Chinese, currently pumping money into the domain market.
XYZ.com’s .xyz gTLD has over 1.7 million domains in its zone file today, making it the largest-volume new gTLD by a considerable margin.
I’m not sure there’s any causal connection here, but it should probably be noted that Daniel Negari and Michael Ambrose, XYZ.com’s CEO and COO respectively, recently acquired a substantial chunk of Rightside.
The two men disclosed November 30 that they had paid over $8.5 million to buy almost 10 million shares — or roughly 5.2% of the company — on the open market.
The NamesCon auction kicks off at 1400 Pacific (2200 UTC) on Monday at the Tropicana in Vegas. It’s being managed by RightOfTheDot and Namejet.

.shop among four gTLDs heading to auction

The new gTLDs .shop, .shopping, .cam and .phone are all set to go to auction after their various delays and objections were cleared up.
It seems that .shop and .shopping contention sets remain merged, so only one string from one applicant will emerge victorious.
That’s due to a completely mad String Confusion Objection decision that ruled the two words are too confusingly similar to coexist in the DNS.
That SCO ruling was made by the same guy who held up both sets of applications when he ruled that .shop and .通販 (“.onlineshopping”) were also too confusingly similar.
The two rulings combined linked the contention sets for all three strings.
.通販 applicant Amazon appealed its SCO loss using a special process that ICANN created especially for the occasion, and won.
But .shop and .shopping applicants were not given the same right to appeal, meaning the auction will take place between nine .shop applicants and .shopping applicants Uniregistry and Donuts.
Donuts is an applicant for .shop and .shopping, meaning it will have to make its mind up which string it prefers, if it intends to win the auction.
If it’s a private auction, Donuts would presumably qualify for a share of its own winning bid. Weird.
(UPDATE: That was incorrect).
The other contention set held up by an inconsistent SCO decision was .cam, which was originally ruled too similar to .com.
Rightside won its appeal too, meaning it will be fought at auction between Famous Four, Rightside and AC Webconnecting.
.phone had been held up for different reasons.
It’s a two-way fight between Donuts and Dish DBS, a TV company that wanted to run .phone as a closed generic. Like almost all closed generic applicants, Dish has since changed its plans.

Viking victor in .cruise gTLD auction

Viking River Cruises has emerged as the winner of the .cruise new gTLD contention set.
It seems to have beaten Cruise Lines International Association, which has withdrawn the only competing application, in an auction.
Both applicants originally proposed a single-registrant model, in which only the registry could own domains, but changed their plans after ICANN adopted Governmental Advisory Committee advice against so-called “closed generic” gTLDs.
There was controversy in July when CLIA claimed Viking had waited too long to change its proposed registration policies.
The group accused Viking of deliberately delaying the contention set.
ICANN, however, rejected its argument, saying applicants can submit change requests at any time.
Viking’s updated application seems to envisage something along the lines of .travel, where registration is limited to credentialed industry members, defined as:

Applicant and its Affiliates, agents, network providers and others involved in the delivery of cruise-related services, including without limitation: companies that hold a license from a governmental or regulatory body to offer cruise services, companies that provide services or equipment to cruise providers, as well as consultants, resellers, engineers, etc., working with the cruise industry.

Viking is already the registry for its dot-brand, .viking.

Live gTLD .reise sold at auction

The first auction of a live new gTLD resulted in a sale, I can reveal.
Dotreise’s .reise, which is German for “.travel”, changed hands in an auction managed by Applicant Auction last Friday.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to identify the winning bidder or the winning bid, but the winner’s identity will inevitably be revealed sooner or later.
Applicant Auction had said there was to be a $400,000 starting bid on the gTLD.
.reise has been general availability since August but has only about 1,300 names in its zone file. It retails for up to $180 a year.
If the TLD’s new owner is not Donuts, the company will find itself competing with Donuts’ much cheaper and more popular .reisen.

Tucows and Namecheap exit $14m .online deal

Tucows and Namecheap have both pulled out of their joint venture with Radix to run the .online registry.
Tucows revealed the move, which will see Radix run .online solo, in a press release yesterday.
Both Tucows and Namecheap are registrars, whereas Radix is pretty much focused on being a registry nowadays.
While financial terms have not been disclosed, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss had previously said that each of the three companies had funded the new venture to the tune of $4 million to $5 million.
I estimate that this puts the total investment in the deal — which includes the price of winning .online at auction — at $13 million to $14 million.
Noss has also hinted that the gTLD sold for much more than the $6.8 million paid for .tech.
.online has not yet been delegated.

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.

.reise to start at $400k in no-reserve auction

Applicant Auction has revealed the starting price of the first live new gTLD to be auctioned off.
Dotreise’s .reise will have a minimum starting bid of $400,000 when it hits the block on February 27, the company revealed.
There will be no reserve.
It seems quite possible that the registry is barely covering its costs, assuming the TLD sells. The application fee was $185,000, and no doubt the company has racked up many more expenses over the last three or four years.
The TLD, which is German for “.travel” has been in general availability since August but has fewer than 1,300 registrations, selling at up to $180 a year.
It competes with Donuts’ $25-a-year .reisen, which pretty much means the same thing.

Schilling laughing as Uniregistry beats Google to .lol

Uniregistry’s portfolio of quirky new gTLDs grew today. The company seems to have beaten Google to .lol in a private deal.
The two companies were the only ones to apply for .lol, and Google’s application was formally withdrawn today.
As usual for private contention set settlements, the winning price has not been disclosed.
Uniregistry has 18 delegated gTLDs in its stable, with five more currently uncontested applications (.lol makes six) waiting in the wings.
I like .lol as a gTLD. It’s a punchy, short, meaningful string that certainly belongs to the right of the dot.
I can see it being deployed in the near term by the incessant sewer of BuzzFeed clones that are increasingly stinking up social media, which could give increased visibility and helpful viral marketing.
Longer term, there may be a worry if in future the kidz stop using “lol” and start viewing it as something their parents say, but we’re probably a ways from that yet.