Recent Posts
- Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins
- .my domains to be sold globally next month
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- .ai up to 425,000 domains
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
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- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
dotMobi to sell 5,000 premium .mobi domains
Afilias-owned dotMobi is taking another crack at selling off over 5,000 “premium” .mobi domain names that it has had reserved since its launch in 2006.
The reserved list, which includes domains such as television.mobi, recipes.mobi and shopping.mobi, has been published, and the domains have been turned on.
They all (or most) now resolve to dotMobi web pages where interested parties can file an expression of interest in the domain, in order to be alerted when they become available.
The actual process by which the domains will be allocated has yet to be announced.
The biggest premium .mobi sale I’m aware of to date was flowers.mobi, which Rick Schwartz picked up for $200,000 in 2006. He plans to sell the domain, probably at a loss, later this month.
The list makes fascinating reading. To my untrained eye, many of the domains appear to be utterly bizarre inclusions.
Businesswoman? Out-of-town meeting? Need to quickly self-administer a Pap smear? Why not visit speculum.mobi for a list of nearby gynecological equipment suppliers?
The full list can be downloaded from here. The official dotMobi announcement is here.
Now .mobi wants to auction ultra-short domains
Afilias-owned dotMobi has applied to ICANN to auction off one and two-letter .mobi domain names, following in the footsteps on other top-level domain registries.
The company had a plan to selectively allocate some such domains based on a Request For Proposals approved by ICANN almost two years ago, now it wants to be able to auction off whatever domains remain.
dotMobi said (pdf):
Once the previously approved RFP round has concluded, dotMobi will conduct an auction of any remaining domains according to a schedule determined by dotMobi. For any domains not allocated during either the RFP or auction rounds, dotMobi will announce a release date and will invite open, first-come-first-served registrations.
Requests to allocate one and two-character domains have previously been submitted and approved by Neustar (.biz), Afilias (.info), puntCAT (.cat), Tralliance (.travel) and RegistryPro (.pro).
Telnic (.tel) has a similar proposal still under board review.
Such auctions offer a one-time windfall for the registry operator. NeuStar’s .biz auction raised a reported $360,000 last year.
As DomainNameWire reported yesterday VeriSign has withdrawn its application for one-letter auctions in .net. Its proposal would have seen expired one-character domains returned to registry control, allowing them to be re-auctioned.
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