Private auctions taking place later this month.
With the start of ICANN’s “Auctions of Last Resort” quickly approaching, some new top level domain applicants are working on last minute contention set resolutions.
Minds + Machines Group Limited (AIM: MMX), the band formerly known as Top Level Domain Holdings, says it’s competing in at least three auctions on April 22. The auctions are for .garden, .property, and .yoga.
The company is in contention with Donuts and Uniregistry for all three of the domains. This seems to confirm that Uniregistry has decided to participate in private auctions after initially saying it wouldn’t due to anti-trust concerns.
Some applicants tell me they think almost all contention sets will get resolved at the last minute before ICANN’s official auctions take place. I’ll believe that only when Google and Amazon decide to participate.
Famous Four Media Is the other wild card in how many new gTLD strings get settled privately
Re: Google…will they or wont they the little teasers 😉
I think both Google and Amazon will be keen to participate in auctions if one of those two models happen and are accepted by all contention set members:
1) Money goes back to applicant only after all contention sets are settled in the program
2) Money goes to some sort of fund or organization
Personally, I think .shop/.shopping/.(japanese IDN) and .web/.webs are the ones likely to go to active ICANN auction due to indirect contention. We will also see pro-forma auctions where one of the participants is not really wanting to win, just to make the competitor lose more, but outside those two cases, I agree that private auctions right before the ICANN scheduled auction are the likely outcome for most of the ~200 contention sets.