Company wins by losing five auctions.
New top level domain name company Minds + Machines has bolstered its bank account by $8.4 million as a result of losing five private auctions for new top level domain names. The losses included a handful of highly contested strings, such as .cloud and .book.
That’s not bad for a company that originally said it wouldn’t even participate in private auctions.
The company lost auctions for:
- .book – 9 applicants were in this contention set, including Amazon and Google. Only Amazon and R.R. Bowker LLC haven’t withdrawn their applications; my money is on Amazon.com.
- .cloud- There were 7 applicants, and the winner was ARUBA S.p.A., beating the likes of Google and Amazon
- .dog – Donuts won this three way race with Google and Minds + Machines
- .site- Radix won the five-way contention set
- .style – Donuts won the five-way race
Can we get the data for all the public numbers and then figure out the bits? It is all about few linear equations, is it not?
Looks like Amazon have got .book – it’ll be interesting to see any registration policy and if they enforce what they had written in their application.
And if they do, I really don’t know how that’s supposed to be good for the Internet.
Winning a UDRP comes at a cost, even if you win it with Reverse domain name hijacking. Considering the time spent to put together the documentation necessary to prove your case also the cost of hiring a lawyer to defend you.
A trademark will devalue the domain name. Many people will shy away from buying it. The system is broken. It is time for WIPO and the USPTO t to change the policy to and consider rejecting a trademark if domain name is not owned by the applicant, and for ICANN to penalize those who abuse the policy should be paying the cost in $$$.