Recent Posts
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- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
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- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
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- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
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- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
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- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
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- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
.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.
Donuts can win with both .shop and .shopping; the only .shop applicant in contention with .shopping is Comercial Connect LLC and the only .shopping applicant in contention with Comercial Connect .shop is Donuts. The indirect contention means that Comercial Connect LLC is the one that needs the most money to win .shop, and if they do, Uniregistry gets .shopping for free.
Thanks Rubens.
I think you’re right.
I’m going to spend an hour or two getting my facts straight and then post a correction if needs be.