.web could already be a record-breaker as auction enters day two

It seems likely that .web has already smashed through the $41.5 million record sale price for a new gTLD at ICANN auction.
The auction, which kicked off properly at 1300 UTC yesterday, seems to have ended its first day of bidding at around 2300 UTC last night without a winner.
That suggests, based on the rules and how previous auctions have played out, that we’re probably already looking at high bids over $50 million.
The previous top price for a gTLD at ICANN auction was .shop, which sold to GMO for $41.5 million earlier this year.
The signs are that .web will go for more.
Be warned, this is mostly informed guesswork. I don’t know what the current bids are.
ICANN auctions work in rounds. In each round the minimum bid is either $1 (for round one) or the previous round’s maximum bid (for all subsequent rounds).
The maximum bid in each round is set by the auctioneer, who has broad discretion, based on the action at the time.
The range between minimum and maximum bids seems to get bigger in each passing round, based on previous auction results.
According to ICANN auction rules (pdf) each bidding round lasts 20 minutes and is immediately followed by a 20-minute recess.
This schedule is somewhat flexible. It could be slowed down or sped up with the consent of all bidders.
The .web auction was due to kick off at 1300 UTC yesterday, according to court papers, though it seems probable that round-one bids were accepted the previous night.
The first day’s bidding was due to end at 2330 UTC yesterday.
So that’s over 10 hours of bidding yesterday, which works out to about 15 rounds if they stuck to the 40-minute round schedule.
When .shop sold for $41.5 million, it did so in just 14 rounds, carried out in a single day.
The final round of that auction saw an acceptable bidding range of $36.8 million to $46 million — an almost $10 million spread.
So, if we can assume that there were at least 15 rounds in the .web auction yesterday and we can assume that the auctioneer is following a similar playbook to the .shop auction, the maximum bid when the auction paused overnight was likely well over $50 million.
By the time you read this, this guesswork could be moot anyway. I expect we’ll find out later today whether those assumptions were accurate. It seems unlikely that a third day’s bidding will be required.
The applicants for .web are NDC, Radix, Donuts, Schlund, Afilias, Google and Web.com. Vistaprint’s bid for .webs is also in the auction.

Donuts denied! .web auction to go ahead today

A California judge had denied Donuts’ eleventh-hour attempt to delay today’s .web gTLD auction.
In a ruling late yesterday, Judge Percy Anderson rejected the company’s request for an emergency temporary restraining order preventing ICANN from selling off the premium gTLD.
This means the auction is pretty much certain to go ahead starting at 1300 UTC — that’s 6am local time for ICANN — today.
Donuts had sought the TRO because it claims ICANN failed in its duty to investigate whether rival bidder Nu Dot Co is now backed by a new big-money controlling party.
Its ultimate goal appears to have been to somehow force .web to private settlement, where all the unsuccessful applicants could get a multi-million dollar pay-off.
Anderson dismissed the request for a multitude of largely technical legal reasons surrounding the timing of Donuts’ request.
He said that, had ICANN not already filed its opposition to the TRO, he would have ruled against Donuts simply for failure to formally serve ICANN in a timely fashion.
But on the merits, he ruled that there was not a strong likelihood of Donuts winning a full trial, due to the statements of two NDC executives, who swore on oath there had been no change to the company’s ownership or management.
Anderson wrote (pdf):

Based on the strength of ICANN’s evidence submitted in opposition to the Application for TRO, and the weakness of Plaintiff’s efforts to enforce vague terms contained in the ICANN bylaws and Applicant Guidebook, the Court concludes that Plaintiff has failed to establish that it is likely to succeed on the merits, raise serious issues, or show that the balance of hardships tips sharply in its favor on its breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and negligence claims. Moreover, because the results of the auction could be unwound, Plaintiff has not met its burden to establish that it will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of the preliminary injunctive relief it seeks. The Court additionally concludes that the public interest does not favor the postponement of the auction.

He did give Donuts leave to amend its request, but given that the auction is due to start today before California office/court hours, that courtesy seems moot.
It’s likely that by the end of the day we will know how much the .web, and possibly .webs, domains fetched. We’re certainly looking at eight figures for .web, in my view.
Some have guessed prices in the ballpark of $50 million, based on the $41.5 million paid for .shop earlier this year.
It seems at least seven of the eight applicants in the auction will be bidding blind, strategically speaking.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that NDC does indeed have one or more secret sugar daddies supporting its bid, insulated from public view by NDC’s corporate structure.
The applicants for .web are NDC, Radix, Donuts, Schlund, Afilias, Google and Web.com. Vistaprint’s bid for .webs is also in the auction.
ICANN currently has over $100 million in a bank account, segregated from its operating funds, from previous last-resort auctions.

Donuts .web claims “discredited”, ICANN tells court

Donuts’ attempt to delay tomorrow’s .web gTLD auction is based on a now “discredited” reading of a single email from rival bidder Nu Dot Co, ICANN told a California court yesterday.
Supporting ICANN’s opposition to Donuts’ motion for a temporary restraining order, two top NDC executives also swore under penalty of perjury that the company is not under new ownership or management.
The filings were made in response to Donuts’ lawsuit, filed Friday, which seeks over $10 million damages and a TRO against the .web auction.
Donuts believes that NDC has been taken over by an as-yet unknown third party with a vested interest in keeping the auction proceeds out of the hands of its competitors by forcing an ICANN-run last-resort auction.
Its belief is based on a June 7 email from NDC CFO Jose Rasco that alludes to COO Nicolai Bezsonoff no longer being with the company and makes reference to unspecified “powers that be” that are now in charge of the company.
By not disclosing the alleged change of control to ICANN, NDC broke Application Guidebook rules, Donuts claims.
But according to ICANN and NDC, this is all nonsense. ICANN told the court:

three separate ICANN bodies – ICANN’s staff, ICANN’s Ombudsman, and ICANN’s Board – have already looked into the alleged change in Nu Dotco’s ownership or management. All three found no credible evidence that any such change had occurred within Nu Dotco, and therefore nothing supported a delay of the Auction. Plaintiff’s TRO application, filed nearly three months after the Auction was scheduled and just two business days before bidding is set to officially begin, relies solely on a strained, and now completely discredited, interpretation of the Nu Dotco CFO’s June 7 email. However, the evidence accompanying this opposition – sworn declarations from ICANN and Nu Dotco executives – confirms that Nu Dotco has not made any change in its ownership or management, much less a “disqualifying” change that should derail the Auction processes already under way or the official start of bidding.

Rasco and Nicolai Bezsonoff both swear in accompanying declarations that the managers and members (ie owners) of NDC have not changed since the original 2012 application.
NDC, according to its .web application, is owned by two Delaware shell companies — Domain Marketing Holdings, LLC and NUCO LP, LLC — both of which appear to have been created in order to provide a layer of separation between NDC and its actual investors.
Rasco and Bezsonoff say that these two companies remain the only owners of NDC requiring their identities to be disclosed to ICANN.
There’s no comment in either declaration about whether either of those two companies has undergone a change in control.
What we seem to have here, amusingly, is NDC using exactly the same legal tricks as Donuts to hide the ultimate beneficiaries of its gTLD applications.
Donuts, you may recall, applied for 307 new gTLDs via 307 distinct shell LLCs with randomly generated names. Not only that, but each of those LLCs is owned by one of two other shell companies — 201 belonged to Dozen Donuts LLC, 106 belonged to Covered TLD LLC.
Donuts never formally disclosed in its ICANN applications (or, to my recollection, publicly confirmed) that business partner Rightside had the right to buy any of the Covered TLD strings — including .web, it seems — a right Rightside has exercised many times since.
Rightside basically got the same layer of identity insulation that whoever’s pulling the strings at NDC is getting now.
That irony is not pointed out in ICANN’s latest court filing, which can be read here (pdf). The Rasco and Bezsonoff declarations can be read here and here.
The applicants for .web are NDC, Radix, Donuts, Schlund, Afilias, Google and Web.com. Vistaprint’s bid for .webs is also in the auction.
Unless Donuts gets its TRO, the auction will begin at 1400 UTC tomorrow and we could find out how much .web sold for later that day.

Donuts files $10 million lawsuit to stop .web auction

Donuts has sued ICANN in an attempt to block the auction of the .web gTLD this Wednesday.
The gTLD portfolio registry filed a lawsuit in California on Friday, seeking over $10 million in damages and a temporary restraining order to stop the auction going ahead.
The complaint alleges breach of contract, negligence and unfair competition and seeks a court declaration that the covenant not to sue signed by all new gTLD applicants is unenforceable.
According to Donuts, ICANN breached its duties by not fully investigating the allegation that rival .web applicant Nu Dot Co has undergone a change of control and has a new, wealthier owner.
NDC is the only applicant in the eight-strong .web/.webs contention set that refuses to resolve the contest privately.
A private auction would enrich all losing applicants to the tune of many millions of dollars.
By forcing a “last resort” ICANN auction, NDC has ensured that ICANN will be the only party to benefit from the auction proceeds.
Last-resort auction funds are placed in a separate ICANN account, currently worth over $100 million, which will be spent according to a currently undecided policy created by the ICANN community.
But Donuts’ complaint strongly implies that ICANN is forcing the auction to go ahead because it stands to benefit financially.
Donuts repeats the allegation from its recent joint Request for Reconsideration with Radix that NDC should be forced to disclose to ICANN, via a gTLD application change, the names of its alleged new directors.
It cites again a redacted email from NDC director Jose Ignacio Rasco which talks about fellow listed director Nicolai Bezsonoff no longer being involved with the application but that “several” new directors were.
It adds a quote about Rasco talking about “powers that be”, which Donuts takes to mean he is answering to someone else.
NDC is not listed in the lawsuit, which focuses on ICANN’s obligations under the new gTLD program application contract.
Donuts alleges, for example, that ICANN has a duty to fully investigate whether NDC has indeed changed directors.
ICANN’s Board Governance Committee said last week that ICANN staff had talked to and emailed Rasco about the allegations. Donuts says it should have at least talked to Bezsonoff too.
Donuts also claims that ICANN is not allowed to go ahead with a last-resort auction while there are still outstanding “accountability mechanisms” — including the RfR, which has not yet been formally closed out by the full ICANN board.
The lawsuit also reveals that Donuts simultaneously filed a complaint using ICANN’s less legally formal Independent Review Process, though documentation for that is not yet available.
ICANN’s most recent statement on .web, which just confirms that the .web auction will go ahead this coming Wednesday, was also posted on Friday. It’s not clear if that was posted before or after ICANN became aware of the lawsuit.
All new gTLD applicants had to agree not to sue ICANN when they applied, but Donuts argues that this is unfair and unenforceable.
DotConnectAfrica has had some success with this argument, though Donuts does not cite that case in its own complaint.
There’s been some speculation about the motives of Donuts and others in trying to delay the auction.
The lawsuit will not force NDC into a private auction, but it might buy Donuts and the other applicants more time to consider their strategies.
I’m getting into speculative territory here, but if NDC’s strategy is to win the .web auction as a Trojan horse for its alleged new owner, perhaps revealing the identity of that new owner would make it less likely to insist on a last-resort auction.
If NDC’s alleged new owner has a time-sensitive need for the revenue .web could bring (which could be the case if, for example, the owner was Neustar) perhaps the prospect of a long lawsuit and IRP case could make it more likely to accept a private auction.
If the alleged new owner was revealed to be Verisign — a company more likely than most to acquire .web simply in order to bury it — perhaps that revelation could spur remaining applicants into pooling their resources to defeat it.
It it was a big tech firm from outside the domain industry, perhaps that would strengthen Google’s resolve to win the auction.
That’s all just me talking off the top of my head, of course.
I have no idea whether or not NDC even has new backers, though its behavior in avoiding private auction goes against character and certainly raises eyebrows.
The Donuts complaint, filed as its subsidiary Ruby Glen LLC, can be read here (pdf).

.web auction to go ahead after ICANN denies Donuts/Radix appeal

The new gTLD .web seems set to go to auction next week after ICANN rejected an 11th-hour delay attempt by two applicants.
ICANN’s Board Governance Committee said yesterday that there is no evidence that applicant Nu Dot Co has been taken over by a deep-pocketed third party.
The BGC therefore rejected Donuts’ and Radix’s joint attempt to have the July 27 “last resort” auction delayed.
Donuts and Radix had argued in a Request for Reconsideration earlier this week that Nu Dot Co has changed its board of directors since first applying for .web, which would oblige it to change the application.
Its failure to do so meant they auction should be delayed, they said.
They based their beliefs on an email from NDC director Jose Ignacio Rasco, in which he said one originally listed director was no longer involved with the application but that “several others” were.
There’s speculation in the contention set that a legacy gTLD operator such as Verisign or Neustar might now be in control of NDC.
But the BGC said ICANN had already “diligently” investigated these claims:

in response to the Requesters’ allegations, ICANN did diligently investigate the claims regarding potential changes to Nu Dot’s leadership and/or ownership. Indeed, on several occasions, ICANN staff communicated with the primary contact for Nu Dot both through emails and a phone conversation to determine whether there had been any changes to the Nu Dot organization that would require an application change request. On each occasion, Nu Dot confirmed that no such changes had occurred, and ICANN is entitled to rely upon those representations.

ICANN staff had asked Rasco via email and then telephone whether there had been any changes to NDC’s leadership or control, and he said there had not.
He is quoted by he BGC as saying:

[n]either the ownership nor the control of Nu Dotco, LLC has changed since we filed our application. The Managers designated pursuant to the company’s LLC operating agreement (the LLC equivalent of a corporate Board) have not changed. And there have been no changes to the membership of the LLC either.

The RfR has therefore been thrown out.
Unless further legal action is taken, the auction is still scheduled for July 27. The deadline for all eight applicants (seven for .web and one for .webs) to post deposits with ICANN passed on Wednesday.
As it’s a last resort auction, all funds raised will go into an ICANN pot, the purpose of which has yet to be determined. The winning bid will also be publicly disclosed.
Had the contention set been settled privately, all losing applicants would have made millions of dollars of profit from their applications and the price would have remained a secret.
NDC is the only applicant refusing to go to private auction.
The applicants for .web are NDC, Radix, Donuts, Schlund, Afilias, Google and Web.com. Vistaprint’s bid for .webs is also in the auction.
The RfR decision can he read here (pdf).

ICANN to flip the secret key to the internet

ICANN is about to embark on a year-long effort to warn the internet that it plans to replace the top-level cryptographic keys used in DNSSEC for the first time.
CTO David Conrad told DI today that ICANN will rotate the so-called Key Signing Key that is used as the “trust anchor” for all DNSSEC queries that happen on the internet.
Due to the complexity of the process, and the risk that something might go wrong, the move is to be announced in the coming days even though the new public key will not replace the existing one until October 2017.
The KSK is a cryptographic key pair used to sign the Zone Signing Keys that in turn sign the DNS root zone. It’s basically at the top of the DNSSEC hierarchy — all trust in DNSSEC flows from it.
It’s considered good practice in DNSSEC to rotate keys every so often, largely to reduce the window would-be attackers have to compromise them.
The Zone Signing Key used by ICANN and Verisign to sign the DNS root is rotated quarterly, and individual domain owners can rotate their own keys as and when they choose, but the same KSK has been in place since the root was first signed in 2010.
Conrad said that ICANN is doing the first rollover partly to ensure that the procedures in has in place for changing keys are effective and could be deployed in case of emergency.
That said, this first rotation is going to happen at a snail’s pace.
Key generation is a complex matter, requiring the physical presence of at least three of seven trusted key holders.
These seven individuals possess physical keys to bank-style strong boxes which contain secure smart cards. Three of the seven cards are needed to generate a new key.
Each of the quarterly ZSK signing ceremonies — which are recorded and broadcast live over the internet — takes about five hours.
The first step in the rollover, Conrad said, is to generate the keys at ICANN’s US east coast facility in October this year. A copy will be moved to a facility on the west coast in February.
The first time the public key will appear in DNS will be July 11, 2017, when it will appear alongside the current key.
It will finally replace the current key completely on October 11, 2017, by which time the DNS should be well aware of the new key, Conrad said.
There is some risk of things going wrong, which could affect domains that are DNSSEC-signed, which is another reason for the slowness of the rollover.
If ISPs that support DNSSEC do not start supporting the new KSK before the final switch-over, they’ll fail to correctly resolve DNSSEC-signed domains, which could lead to some sites going dark for some users.
There’s also a risk that the increased DNS packet sizes during the period when both KSKs are in use could cause queries to be dropped by firewalls, Conrad said.
“Folks who have things configured the right way won’t actually need to do anything but because DNSSEC is relatively new and this software hasn’t really been tested, we need to get the word out to everyone that this change is going to be occurring,” said Conrad.
ICANN will conduct outreach over the coming 15 months via the media, social media and technology conferences, he said.
It is estimated that about 20% of the internet’s DNS resolvers support DNSSEC, but most of those belong to just two companies — Google and Comcast — he said.
The number of signed domains is tiny as a percentage of the 326 million domains in existence today, but still amounts to millions of names.

Cruz’s ICANN paranoia is now official Republican policy

US Republicans have endorsed hitherto fringe views on the IANA transition as official party policy.
Yesterday delegates at the Republican National Convention approved the party’s 2016 Platform of the party, which “declares the Party’s principles and policies”.
Internet policy takes up just half a page of the 66-page document, but it’s half a page straight out of the paranoid mind of former presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz.
It talks of the transition of the US government from its involvement in DNS root zone management (what the GOP calls “web names”) as an “abandonment” of internet freedoms to Russia, China and Iran, which are ready to “devour” them.
Here’s the relevant passage in (almost) full.

Protecting Internet Freedom
The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk. Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government. The President… has unilaterally announced America’s abandonment of the international internet by surrendering U.S. control of the root zone of web names [sic] and addresses. He threw the internet to the wolves, and they — Russia, China, Iran, and others — are ready to devour it.
We salute the Congressional Republicans who have legislatively impeded his plans to turn over the Information Freedom Highway to regulators and tyrants. That fight must continue, for its outcome is in doubt. We will consistently support internet policies that allow people and private enterprise to thrive, without providing new and expanded government powers to tax and regulate so that the internet does not become the vehicle for a dramatic expansion of government power.
The internet’s independence is its power. It has unleashed innovation, enabled growth, and inspired freedom more rapidly and extensively than any other technological advance in human history. We will therefore resist any effort to shift control toward governance by international or other intergovernmental organizations. We will ensure that personal data receives full constitutional protection from government overreach. The only way to safeguard or improve these systems is through the private sector. The internet’s free market needs to be free and open to all ideas and competition without the government or service providers picking winners and losers.

Previously, such views had been expressed by just a handful of elected Republicans, notably Cruz, who has introduced a bill to block the IANA transition until Congress passes law specifically allowing it.
The irony in the latest GOP statement is that the transition is actually a transfer of power away from governments (specifically, the US government) into the private sector.
The current plan for a post-US ICANN, which was put together over two years by hundreds of participants mostly from the private sector, would see Governmental Advisory Committee advice carry less weight unless it receives full consensus.
In other words, if Iran, China and Russia want to destroy freedom of speech, they’ll have to persuade over 150 other governments to their cause.
Should that ever happen, a new multi-stakeholder (and in this example, government free) “Empowered Community” would have the power to put a stop to it.
The goal is to have the transition completed shortly after the current IANA contract between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce expires at the end of September.
That’s before the US presidential elections, of course, which take place in November.

How many elephants did ICANN send to Helsinki?

ICANN ships a quite staggering amount of equipment to its thrice-yearly public meetings, equivalent to more than 12 mid-sized cars at the recent Helsinki meeting.
That’s one of the interesting data points in ICANN’s just published “Technical Report” — a 49-page data dump — for ICANN 56.
It’s the second meeting in a row the organization has published such a report, the first for a so-called “Meeting B” or “Policy Forum” which run on a reduced-formality, more focused schedule.
The Helsinki report reveals that 1,436 people showed up in person, compared to 2,273 for March’s Marrakech meeting, which had a normal ICANN meeting agenda.
The attendees were 61% male and 32% female. Another 7% did not disclose their gender. No comparable numbers were published in the Marrakech report.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the Helsinki numbers show not a terrible gender balance as far as tech conferences go. It’s a bit better than you’d expect from anecdotal evidence.
Not many big tech events publish their male/female attendee ratios, but Google has said attendees at this year’s Google IO were 23% female.
Europeans accounted for most of the Helsinki attendees, as you might expect, at 43%. That compared to 20% in Marrakech.
The next largest geographic contingent came from North America — 27%, compared to just 18% in Marrakech.
The big surprise to me is how much equipment ICANN ships out to each of its meetings.
In March, it moved 93 metric tonnes (103 American tons) of kit to Marrakech. About 19 metric tonnes of that was ICANN-owned gear, the rest was hired. That weighs as much as 3.5 African elephants, the report says.
For Helsinki, that was up to 19.7 metric tonnes, more than 12 cars’ worth. Shipped equipment includes stuff like 412 microphones, 73 laptops and 28 printers.
In both reports, ICANN explains the shipments like this:

Much like a touring band, ICANN learned over time that the most cost-effective method of ensuring that meeting participants have a positive experience is to sea freight our own equipment to ICANN meetings. We ship critical equipment, then rent the remaining equipment locally to help promote the economy.

Rock on.
The Helsinki report, which reveals more data than anyone could possibly find useful, can be downloaded as a PDF here.

Is Verisign .web applicant’s secret sugar daddy?

The fiercely contested .web gTLD is being forced into a last-resort auction and some people seem to think a major registry player is behind it.
Two .web applicants — Radix (pdf) and Schlund (pdf) — this week wrote to ICANN to demand that the .web auction, currently planned for July 27, be postponed.
They said the sale should be delayed to give applicants time “to investigate whether there has been a change of leadership and/or control” at rival applicant Nu Dot Co LLC.
Nu Dot Co is a new gTLD investment vehicle headed up by Juan Diego Calle, who launched and ran .CO Internet until it was sold to Neustar a couple of years ago.
I gather that some applicants believe that Nu Dot Co’s .web application is now being bankrolled by a larger company with deeper pockets.
The two names I’ve heard bandied around, talking to industry sources this week, are Verisign and Neustar.
Nobody I’ve talked to has a shred of direct evidence either company is involved and Calle declined to comment.
So is this paranoia or not?
There are a few reasons these suspicions may have come about.
First, the recent revelation that successful .blog applicant Primer Nivel, a no-name Panama entity with a Colombian connection, was actually secretly being bankrolled by WordPress, has opened eyes to the possibility of proxy bidders.
It was only after the .blog contention set was irreversibly settled that the .blog contract changed hands and the truth become known.
Some applicants may have pushed the price up beyond the $19 million winning bid — making the rewards of losing the private auction that much higher — had they known they were bidding against a richer, more motivated opponent.
Second, sources say the .web contention set had been heading to a private auction — in which all losing applicants get a share of the winning bid — but Nu Dot Co decided to back out at the last minute.
Under ICANN rules, if competing applicants are not able to privately resolve their contention set, an ICANN last-resort auction must ensue.
Third, this effective vetoing of the private auction does not appear to fit in with Nu Dot Co’s strategy to date.
It applied for 13 gTLDs in total. Nine of those have already gone to auctions that Nu Dot Co ultimately lost (usually reaping the rewards of losing).
The other four are either still awaiting auction or, in the case of .corp, have been essentially rejected for technical reasons.
It usually only makes sense to go to an ICANN last-resort auction — where the proceeds all go to ICANN — if you plan on winning or if you want to make sure your competitors do not get a financial windfall from a private auction.
Nu Dot Co isn’t actually an operational registry, so it doesn’t strictly have competitors.
That suggests to some that its backer is an operational registry with a disdain for new gTLD rivals. Verisign, in other words.
Others think Neustar, given the fact that its non-domains business is on the verge of imploding and its previous acquisition of .CO Internet from Calle.
I have no evidence either company is involved. I’m just explaining the thought process here.
According to its application, two entities own more than 15% of Nu Dot Co. Both — Domain Marketing Holdings, LLC and NUCO LP, LLC — are Delaware shell corporations set up via an agent in March 2012, shortly before the new gTLD application filing deadline.
Many in the industry are expecting .web to go for more than the $41.5 million GMO paid for .shop. Others talk down the price, saying “web” lacks the cultural impact it once had.
But it seems we will all find out later this month.
Responding to the letters from Schlund and Radix, ICANN yesterday said that it had no plans to postpone the July 27 last-resort auction.
All seven applicants had to submit a postponement form by June 12 if they wanted a delay, ICANN informed them in a letter (pdf), and they missed that deadline.
They now have until July 20 to either resolve the contention privately or put down their deposits, ICANN said.
The applicants for .web, aside from Nu Dot Co, are Google, Donuts, Radix, Schlund, Web.com and Afilias.
Due to a string confusion ruling, .webs applicant Vistaprint will also be in the auction.

Web.com policy exec moves to ICANN

Domain industry veteran Jennifer Gore is to become ICANN’s new director of registrar relations.
She takes over the role from Mike Zupke, who I gather is leaving ICANN, from next Monday. She will report to Cyrus Namazi in ICANN’s Global Domains Division.
Gore was most recently senior director of policy at Web.com, a role she held for over five years. Much of her earlier career was spent at Network Solutions and Verisign.
Her move from industry to ICANN means she has had to resign her position on the GNSO Council, where she represented the Registrars Stakeholder Group.
The RrSG will now have to hold an election to find her replacement.