As .stream is won, ICANN’s auction list empties

.stream has become the latest new gTLD contention set to be settled prior to its ICANN auction, leaving ICANN’s auction schedule looking barren.
Famous Four Media beat Hughes Satellite Systems to the string, which was due to auction May 27.
The four strings scheduled for bidding April 29 — .living, .fun, .map and .search — were also recently settled.
All that remains on ICANN’s schedule is the controversial .game/.games contention set, which will employ a unique process designed for contention sets created by inconsistent singular/plural string confusion rulings.
The five .game applicants and one .games applicant (Donuts) are still due to hit the block May 20.
A couple dozen other gTLDs are still pending ICANN auction but do not have set dates due to various challenges and disputes.

Google wins .map and .search

Google has secured two gTLDs representing two of its core services.
The company has won .search and .map, fighting off competition from Amazon, Donuts, Famous Four Media for .search and Rightside and Amazon for .map.
All the losing bidders have now withdrawn their applications.
Both strings were due to head to ICANN auction April 29, but appear to have been settled privately instead.
That means the winning bids will not be disclosed.
Google plans to operate .map as an open gTLD in which anyone can register.
It had originally planned to keep .search domains limited to itself, until ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and others complained about so-called “closed generics”.
Its updated .search application talks about restricting .search to sites that offer search functionality that adheres to a certain technical standard.
Specifically, domains in .search will have to follow a certain URL format (example.search/?q=query, the format used by Google itself) for queries.
It’s going to be very interesting how Google goes about implementing the plans in its application. We could be looking at some innovative or possibly controversial services.

Donuts bought .reise

Donuts has been confirmed by a German news site as the new owner of .reise, which was auctioned by its previous owner last week.
It was the first time a live gTLD had been sold at auction.
The deal, which is believed to have cost Donuts at least $400,000, means the company now owns .reise and .reisen.
Both mean “.travel”. According to my GCSE German skillz, last exercised 22 years ago, .reisen is a verb and .reise is a noun, but .reisen is also the plural of the noun .reise.
I believe this means that Donuts is the first company to own both the plural and singular forms of a new gTLD string.
Heise Online reports that former registry Dotreise was forced to sell up due to competition from Donuts.
Donuts’ .reisen has over 4,000 names in its zone file, compared to .reise’s 1,300. It’s a small market so far, but Donuts has the lion’s share.
The article notes that Donuts got a better position in ICANN’s prioritization draw in late 2012, meaning it got to market slightly earlier. Donuts also sells for a much lower price.
I doubt time to market was as much of a factor as price.
But it might be interesting to note that while Donuts’ advantage was just six days in terms of contract-signing, that lead had been extended to six weeks by the time .reise was delegated.
Donuts, which has more experience than any other company when it comes to the transition to delegation process, managed to hit general availability two weeks sooner than .reise, even though Donuts’ sunrise period was twice as long.

Generics versus brands as two more gTLDs are sold

Two more new gTLD contention sets have been settled by auction, one a case of a portfolio applicant prevailing over a closed generic applicant, the other a case of a brand owner paying off a portfolio applicant.
Donuts has won the right to .jewelry over $10 billion-a-year jewelry firm Richemont, owner of brands including Cartier.
Richemont applied for several TLDs, some of which were generic terms. It was awarded .watches uncontested, but apparently didn’t want to fork out as much as Donuts for the matching .jewelry.
Google, meanwhile, won the two-horse race for .moto against Rightside. This one’s interesting because it’s basically a case of Rightside forcing Google to pay up to own one of its own brands.
Google owns a trademark on “Moto” due to its acquisition of Motorola Mobility a few years ago, but Rightside applied for it in its generic sense as an abbreviation of “motorcycle” or “motorbike”.
Google had filed a legal rights objection against its rival for .moto, but lost. Now it’s been forced to cough up at auction instead.
Prices, as usual, have not been disclosed.

.blog won in eight-figure auction by Primer Nivel

A Colombian registrar has become the unlikely owner of the coveted .blog new gTLD, beating eight other applicants to the string at auction.
Winning bidder Primer Nivel is a Panamanian company affiliated with Bogota-based CCI REG, which runs my.co.
The company was the first to reveal its plans to apply for .blog, telling DI back in April 2012 about its ambitions of the gTLD.
Rival bidders Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts, Afilias, Merchant Law Group, BET, Google and Top Level Design all withdrew their applications over the weekend.
We’re certainly looking at an eight-figure sale here.
Kieren McCarthy, writing at The Register, reckons it went for $30 million or more, based on the fact that M+M got $3.4 million for withdrawing from .blog and .store auctions, but his back-of-the-envelope calculations are off-target for a few reasons.
Knowledgeable DI sources say the sale price was considerably lower than $30 million.
My envelope puts it at somewhere in the range of $15 million to $18 million.
I’ve always said .blog is among my favorite new gTLD strings. The market opportunity is potentially huge, with hundreds of millions of blogs live on the web today.
Primer Nivel, which to the best of my knowledge is not (unlike some other applicants) affiliated with a particular blogging platform, plans to operate .blog as an open gTLD.
The separate auction for .store, meanwhile, was won by Radix, after withdrawals from M+M, Donuts, Amazon, Google, Dot Store and Uniregistry this weekend.

.baby and .mls fetch over $3 million each

ICANN and Power Auctions have completed December’s mini-batch of “last resort” new gTLD auctions, adding a total of $6.4 million to its mysterious auction cash pile.
Johnson & Johnson won .baby, fighting off five portfolio applicants and paying a winning bid of $3,088,888.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Real Estate Association beat Afilias to .mls, paying $3,359,000.
I called it for CREA earlier this week, noting that the organization wanted .mls enough that it filed two applications, a failed Community Priority Evaluation, and an unsuccessful Legal Rights Objection against Afilias.
ICANN has now raised over $34 million selling off 10 strings at last resort auctions, with prices ranging from $600,000 (.信息) to $6.7 million (.tech).
The money has been set aside for purposes currently undecided. At least one applicant wants ICANN to redistribute the cash to losing bidders, which I don’t think is particularly likely.

.love won by class action lawyers

It appears that the contested new gTLD .love has been won by the law firm Merchant Law Group, after an auction.
Minds + Machines, Richemont, Google and Donuts have all officially withdrawn their competing applications. I gather that withdrawals from Uniregistry and Famous Four Media are on their way.
.love would be MLG’s first successful new gTLD application.
The would-be portfolio applicant applied for eight strings, all of which were contested by others. It has withdrawn bids for .news, .club and .law after auctions.
MLG is odd as new gTLD applicants go. It’s a Canadian law firm that offers services across many areas of law but seems to specialize in class action lawsuits.
According to its application, .love will be positioned in the same space as .wed and .wedding:

.LOVE’s target markets are broad enough to maintain a financially viable TLD and distinct enough that the .LOVE TLD will not become ‘just another .info’. A .LOVE TLD will provide a unique space on the Internet for information and services related to the idea of love, engagements, marriage, and family. It will allow anyone to register a domain name and post information about products and services related to the idea of love, an engagement, a marriage, or family.

It is anticipated to be an open, unrestricted gTLD running on a CentralNic back-end.

Private auction settles controversial plural gTLD fight

A private auction has been used to settle a new gTLD contention set containing two different strings for the first time.
Afilias has won the right to run .pet after Google withdrew its application for .pet and Donuts withdrew its bid for .pets.
The two strings, one the plural of the other, had been placed into indirect contention by ICANN after a String Confusion Objection panel controversially ruled in August 2013 that .pet and .pets were too confusingly similar to be allowed to coexist.
This means that Donuts has been forced to withdraw an uncontested application.
Notably, it was Google that filed, fought and won the SCO complaint, and it didn’t even wind up with the TLD it wanted.
The final settlement of the contention set reflects ICANN’s inconsistent policy on plurals. Several plural/singular combinations — such as .career(s) and .photo(s) — already coexist in the DNS.

Donuts wins five more new gTLD auctions

Donuts added five new gTLDs to its ever-growing portfolio this week, as the results of five private auctions were revealed.
The company won the following strings:
.news — went to Donuts after withdrawals from Merchant Law Group, Amazon, Radix, Uniregistry, Famous Four Media and Primer Nivel. As somebody with a vested interest in the news media, I’m glad this one went to a registry with an open registration policy.
.golf — Donuts beat Famous Four, Dot Golf and Fegistry.
.casino — Donuts won after withdrawals from Famous Four, Afilias and dotBeauty.
.school — Donuts beat Fegistry, Uniregistry and Minds + Machines.
.football — Donuts beat Famous Four.
The registry currently has 156 delegated TLDs, more than half of those it originally applied for. It has another 99 active applications in various stages of pre-delegation.

M+M raises $4.4m losing latest gTLD auctions

Minds + Machines made $4.4 million losing three recent new gTLD auctions, according to a company press release.
It’s withdrawn bids for .latino, .school and a third string it said it could not disclose due to the rules of the private auction.
M+M now says it has $45 million cash on hand.
So far, the company has withdrawn 31 new gTLD applications, almost half of its original 70. Not all of those were lost at auction.
It has 17 contested applications left and expects those contention sets to be resolved one way or the other by the end of June 2015.