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.web has an auction date

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2016, 09:15:01 (UTC), Domain Registries

The .web gTLD will go to auction July 27, according to ICANN.
The organization released an updated auction schedule (pdf) on Wednesday night that also slates .kids/.kid for an auction on the same day.
Both auctions have confusing “indirect contention” elements, where two strings were ruled confusingly similar.
With .web, it’s lumped in with Vistaprint’s application for .webs, which lost a String Confusion Objection filed by Web.com.
Under ICANN rules, .webs is confusingly similar to to Web.com’s .web, but not to the other six .web applications.
This means that Vistaprint and Web.com basically are fighting a mini contention set auction to see who gets their applied-for gTLD.
If Web.com wins the auction for .web, Vistaprint cannot have .webs. However, if any other .web applicant wins, Vistaprint can go ahead with .webs.
Either way, there will be a .web delegated this year. Google, Donuts, Radix, Afilias, Schlund Technologies, Nu Dot Co are all contenders.
In the case of .kids/.kid, the one applicant for .kid — Google — won SCOs against DotKids Foundation and Amazon by default because both .kids applicants failed to respond to the complaints.
DotKids Foundation recently lost a Community Priority Evaluation, enabling the auction to go ahead.
Because Google is in contention with both .kids applicants, only one of the two strings will ultimately be delegated — .kids and .kid will not coexist.
The only other scheduled auction right now is that of .doctor, which is planned for May 25. Radix, Donuts and The Medical Registry will fight it out in this rather less complex battle.
It’s worth noting that if any of these contention sets unanimously choose to resolve their differences via private auction, none of the ICANN auctions will go ahead.

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Comments (13)

  1. Anthony says:

    Hello Kevin,
    How long after the auction until people can start buying the domains, approx?
    Thank you,
    Anthony

  2. Christopher Ambler says:

    It will be delegated this year?
    You sure about that?

  3. Adam says:

    This will become a major extension. I bet at least a million registrations in the first year.
    How can anyone compete with Google’s registry in bidding for .web?

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      Google has passed on many strings people found interesting. If Google agrees to private auction, then it’s likely not interested and will just collect… if it goes to ICANN auction, it’s very likely they will bid to win.

      • Adam says:

        Are the private auction blind bids? I imagine they will want .WEB even if it is a private auction Rubens.
        Do you know how ICANN makes the determination of private vs public auction?

  4. Christopher Ambler says:

    Yes, .web is a great TLD.
    I bet whomever had the idea first is a smart guy 😉
    (Sorry, Kevin, feeling a little flippant today)

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Postel, wasn’t it?

      • Adam says:

        In this interview Chris Ambler states his company was the first to come up with the idea for .WEB, .AUTO, and .CAR domain extensions.
        “Oh, you noticed that, did you?” And so, he said, “Well, which one would you want to run – just I am curious -, and we can work on this.” I actually came up with .AUTO, .CAR, and .WEB, because we had been doing a lot for auto dealers. And actually I proposed to a couple the auto manufacturers. You want dot whatever your brand is.”
        In reference to talking about launching new extensions with Jon Postel.
        Source – http://www.domainsherpa.com/chris-ambler-domain-name-expiration/

      • Christopher Ambler says:

        No, it was me.
        Postel said that he’d been contacted by two other individuals (one was Simon Higgs, a fun guy) to run registries. They’d had the same idea I had. None of them proposed strings, though.
        I proposed car, auto and web.
        Postel said sure, strings aren’t important – let’s set up a policy and see some running code.
        So I built a registry. Back then it wasn’t too hard. And it scaled.
        History.

    • Adam says:

      When I write a book on new gTLDs I’ll include a chapter on your Chris. 🙂

  5. DonnyM says:

    It will go for 50 million plus+.
    This is a true number #2 extension.
    DonnyM

Leave a Reply to Anthony