ICANN New gTLD Auction Proceeds Approaching $30 Million by Philip Corwin, Internet Commerce Association
While the debate continues as to whether most new gTLDs are a sound long-term investment for their registry operators, there’s no disputing that the program has been an economic boom for ICANN. The 1,930 first round applications each required an application fee of $185,000, which added up to a tidy $357 million. Even after refunds for withdrawn applications ICANN still cleared about a third of a billion dollars from the first round before a single string was delegated.
Now, like the proverbial gift that keeps on giving, ICANN has received a total of an additional $28.5 million in proceeds from its own “last resort” auctions held prior to November. And that total, equal to about eight percent of all new gTLD application fees, came from a mere eight gTLDs! The three highest bids were Dot Tech’s $6.8 million bid for .Tech; Fegistry’s $5.6 million for .Realty; and Outer Orchard’s $5.1 million for .Salon. Meanwhile, Amazon spent a total of $6.8 million for two gTLDs, .Buy and .Spot.
And the money continues to accumulate, with Dish DBS having just plunked down $700,000 for .Dot. That was just one of five ICANN-conducted gTLD auctions scheduled for November, although the others were settled privately pre-auction. And the gTLDs currently scheduled for December are names that could each readily attract seven figure bids — .Baby, .Basketball, .Casino, .Football, .MLS, .Monster, .News, .Pet/.Pets, .School, .Security – and, notwithstanding sentiments that you can’t put a price on it, .Love.
More manna is on the horizon. On November 14th ICANN opened a public comment period regarding “New gTLD Auction Rules for Indirect Contention”. Once those rules are made final, auctions can proceed for four gTLDs contested by a total of thirty applicants — .Game/.Games; .Sport/.Sports; .Web/.Webs; and .Shop/.Shopping (the first three sets involve singular and plural versions of names caught up in inconsistent string contention decisions). Any one of those names could set a new record for top auction price, and collectively they could easily generate $20 million or more. With ICANN recently estimating that the first round of the new gTLD program won’t be completed until mid-2017, tens of $millions more could be realized over the next few years.
By the way, ICANN isn’t the only beneficiary of this process. In September 2013 ICANN signed a no-bid contract with Power Auctions that paid that company an initial $230,000 to develop an auction platform, meaning that the transaction had no potential financial downside of any significance to it (especially since the contract guaranteed an additional $135,000 in total auction management fees even if not a single auction was ever held). And Power Auctions receives an additional four percent of the first $10 million paid in any auction, with an additional two percent for amounts over that – and is guaranteed a minimum payment of $15,000 per auction, as well as a management fee of $10,000 for any auction that is scheduled but subsequently canceled when the participants reach their own settlement.
Apparently that contract did not cover all contingencies, because just last month ICANN gave another $120,000 to Power Auctions to develop a system for conducting auctions for the four indirect contention sets mentioned above. That seems quite generous given that the total commissions collected by Power Auctions for the nine auctions conducted to date totals $1.17 million — for an average management fee of $130,000 per auction. These auctions are relatively brief events, with the initial round lasting 30 minutes and any subsequent rounds twenty minutes each, so the hourly payout is up there with tech moguls and investment bankers.
The big unanswered question is what will ICANN do with all that money? The Board has stated that the decision will be made in consultation with the community, but there is no indication of when that discussion might begin. One industry consultant is advocating that “a marketing plan to allocate ICANN auction funds needs to be in place to increase [new gTLD] registrations”. Developing world advocates or GAC members may well propose investing the money in “capacity-building” and “outreach”. Meanwhile, with new gTLD domain registrations substantially below initial ICANN projections, those funds could become a tempting means for filling any hole in ICANN’s out year budgets.
The larger the auction proceeds get the more “creative” ideas we are likely to see on how to spend that growing cash pile. Perhaps the discussion of its disposition should have been started, and settled, before the money started rolling in. It would certainly seem to be something worthy of a final decision before the IANA functions transition takes place.
This article by Philip Corwin from the Internet Commerce Association was sourced with permission from:
www.internetcommerce.org/icann-new-gtld-auction-proceeds-approaching-30-million/
SnapNames BuyDomains Auction Ends in Five Days! Seven Bids So Far
SnapNames BuyDomains Auction will end in five days on December 4,2014 at 3:15 pm ET. The auction features 108 domain names, at different price ranges.
At the time of writing this article, only seven domain names received bids. The highest bid so far is $6,500 for Proprietary.com. UseAbility.com also managed to attract a lot of interest and received a bid of $6,000 .
Some other interesting domain names included in the auction are:
Arcade.com
Confessional.com
SummerHouses.com
AdvertisersNetwork.com
Deported.com
AmazingHolidays.com
You can see the entire inventory and place your bids here.
Yahoo Files UDRP Complaint For YahooMessengerApp.com Domain Name
The American multinational Internet Corporation,Yahoo,has recently filed a complaint against the owner of YahooMessengerApp.com domain name,seeking control of it.
Yahoo filed the complaint with the National Arbitration Forum on November 25,2014.
According to whois records, the domain name was first registered in October ,2013.
The National Arbitration Forum will examine over the next days if the domain name is confusingly similar to Yahoo’s trademark,if the current owner has rights over it and if the domain is being used in bad faith .YahooMessengerApp.com will be passed over to Yahoo if it falls under all three of these stipulations.
At the time of writing this article, the case is still pending compliance checks with the National Arbitration Forum.
Network Solution Premium Auction Results
The Network SOlution Premium auction held at SnapNames came to an end a few minutes ago. The auction featured 73 domain names, out of which only three sold.
The highest domain name selling was at Punches.com at $1,051.
Here are the results :
Punches.com $1,051
1j4.com $440
LaceUnderwear.com $420
IANA Stewardship Transition Cross Community Working Group (CWG) on Naming Related Functions
Following on from the face-to-face meeting of the Community Working Group (CWG) on Naming Related Functions in Frankfurt, Germany on 19 – 20 November 2014, the CWG has continued to make good progress.
An initial draft of the Proposal from the CWG was published on the CWG mailing list on 26 November 2014 and this was discussed by the CWG in a scheduled meeting on 27 November 2014. The meeting had a number of points on the agenda but focussed substantially on two key areas:
RFP3 – The content of the initial draft proposal from the CWG which relates to item 3 in the request for proposals from the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG).
Key questions / issues to be addressed in public comment – the prospective specific questions or issues that the CWG would like to see addressed as part of the public comment on the draft proposal.
It was also discussed that while the initial draft proposal from the CWG represents a good platform on which to build, there remains significant opportunity for refinement and development by the CWG based on a range of inputs including that from the public comment.
We believe that the key building blocks are in place to produce a timely response to the ICG RFP but recognise the need to remain vigilant on all aspects of the timetable and project plan.
Mindful of the timetable, the next steps in the process are as follows:
Identify proposed changes in the initial draft of the Proposal from the CWG by 12h00 UTC in 29 November 2014.
Integrate changes into the initial draft of the Proposal from the CWG such that it becomes a draft of the Proposal from the CWG published for public comment on 1 December 2014.
Continue to work as a CWG in parallel with public comment period including developing areas of the document relating to items 4, 5 & 6 of the RFP from the ICG.
Recognise that final substantial inputs to the proposal will need to be complete by the end of the weekend of 10/11 January 2015 such that the week following is focussed solely on refining the proposal document.
Ensure widespread awareness of the draft and the key milestones of the CWG including ensuring that all chartering organisations recognise the 19-30 January 2015 time slot for approving the proposal.
We also note that a particular area of attention for the CWG is to ensure effective coordination with the parallel and related process on enhancing ICANN accountability. To that end, the CWG co-chairs met on 28 November 2014 with the co-chairs of the drafting team on Cross Community Working Group (CCWG) on Enhancing ICANN Accountability, at least one of whom (Thomas Rickert) we understand will remain as a co-chair of the CCWG on Enhancing ICANN Accountability. Recognising that the two cross community groups are at different points in their work, it was discussed that the CWG on Naming Related Functions could make a contribution to the CCWG on Accountability by assisting to identify accountability mechanisms that are necessary conditions for the stewardship transition. To this end, we (the co-chairs of the CWG) plan to work with our CWG to identify such necessary conditions for transmission to the CCWG on Accountability in order to assist their work and moreover, to coordinate with the co-chairs of the CCWG on Accountability on an ongoing basis.
This announcement was sourced from :
