Recent Posts
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Millions spent as three more new gTLDs auctioned
Two or three new gTLDs have been sold in a private auction that may well have seen over $20 million spent.
The not-yet-delegated strings .inc, .llc and (I think) .llp hit the block at some point this month.
They are the first new gTLDs to be auctioned since Verisign paid $135 million for .web a little over a year ago.
At this point, nobody wants to talk about which applicant(s) won which of the newly sold strings, but it seems that the proceeds ran into many millions.
MMX, which applied for .inc and .llc, said this morning that it has benefited from a $2.4 million windfall by losing both auctions.
The auctions evidently took place in September, but CEO Toby Hall declined to comment any further, citing non-disclosure agreements.
There were nine remaining applicants for .inc and eight for .llc.
I don’t think it’s possible to work out which sold for how much using just MMX’s disclosure.
But private auctions typically see the winning bid divided equally between the losers.
I believe .llp was probably sold off by auction at the same time.
The reason for this is that .llc, .inc and .llp were contention sets all being held up by one applicant’s dispute with ICANN.
Dot Registry LLC had applied for all three as “community” gTLDs, which meant it had to go through the Community Evaluation Process.
While it failed the CPE on all three counts, the company subsequently filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN, which it won last August.
You may recall that this was the IRP that found disturbing levels of ICANN meddling in the drafting of the CPE panel’s findings.
Ever since then, ICANN has been conducting an internal review, assisted by outside experts, into how the CPE process worked (or didn’t).
Lawyers for Dot Registry and other affected applications (for .music and .gay) have been haranguing ICANN all year to get a move on and resolve the issue.
And yet, just as the end appeared to be in sight, Dot Registry seems to have decided to give up (or, possibly, cash out) and allow the strings to go to auction.
CEO Shaul Jolles declined to comment on the auctions today.
All I can currently tell you is that at least two of the Dot Registry holdout strings have been sold and that MMX did not win either of them.
The applicants for .inc were: Uniregistry, Dot Registry, Afilias, GMO, GTLD Limited, MMX, Nu Dot Co (now a known Verisign front), Donuts and Google.
The applicants for .llc were: MMX, Dot Registry, Nu Dot Co, Donuts, Afilias, Top Level Design, myLLC and Google.
I don’t think we can say that Nu Dot Co is a Verisign front for all strings. It was for .web, but it could be independent, or front for someone else, in these contention sets.
I agree
The moon _could_ also be made of cheese…
Waste of money!