It’s auction mania for new TLDs.
Winners and losers will be made in the new top level domain name program over the next 45 days as 34 domain names reach their deadline for contention set resolution.
ICANN has scheduled 14 domain names for auction on February 25 and another 20 on March 25.
Few of these contention sets won’t be resolved by the auction dates. Already, two hotly contested domain names on the docket for this month have been settled: .blog and .store. .Blog had 9 contenders and .store had 7.
The most contested domain name of all — .app — will also meet its fate this month. 13 companies originally applied for it and one has withdrawn.
March’s auctions will settle sports domains (.soccer, .hockey, .baseball and .run) along with 16 others.
Although the winners and losers of many top level domain names will be determined shortly, it might be many years before we figure out if the winners were the ones who won the auctions or lost them.
Rob says
When does .web come up for auction?
Andrew Allemann says
.web is on hold due to a dispute between .web/.webs. That one is a long way off.
Steve says
The only winner I can see here is ICANN. Everyone for the next 5+ years will type .com at the end of all of these extensions.