ICANN received 1,600 TLD applications, and one company was behind a lot of them.
Welcome to episode #600!
The deadline to apply for a top level domain with ICANN was last Wednesday, and one company went big. Really big.
Link Freedom Group (LFG), a company associated with the team behind .link, followed through on its plans to apply for around 200 top level domains.
On today’s show, LFG CEO Vaughn Liley talks about the thought process the company went through when selecting domains, the impact of the recent web3 integration report, and what he expects to happen in the coming months.
Also: 1,600 applications, GoDaddy Auctions API, web3 integration report, ENS
Sponsor: Sav.com domain transfers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:12 — 33.0MB) | Embed
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Great interview. Thanks for sharing Andrew. Congrats to Vaughn, Yoni, and the LFG team.
Thanks for listening, Joe. Exciting times ahead for the industry!
Interesting discussion. Congratulations on Show #600. The show is better than ever. Thank you for always being so prepared and asking questions that get the most from your guests. (Just to complete the saying that Vaughn mentioned – A jack of all trades is a master of none, BUT FAR MUCH BETTER THAN A MASTER OF ONE.
This was an interesting interview for sure but I’m still a bit confused about this application. He talks about other people overspending early but they have just spent over $70m in applications fees alone? He didn’t really answer your question about why you’d apply for .nft if you don’t want to deal with the trouble of an alt namespace. I understand .crypto might be more hotly contested for but ultimately if you win either you are going to have to deal with the same issues. He talks about .eth not being viable because of its clash with the 3-letter CC for Ethiopia and that they have done their homework with all their applications but they have applied for .con and .nil – doesn’t that mean you spent half a million dollars on two applications that are surely going to be rejected based on string similarity evaluation considering how similar they look and sound to two of the original gTLDs? .ml already causes issues for .mil and it only exists because it’s a CC.
We don’t know exactly how many domains LFG applied for. Its list included replacement strings. Still, it’s clear it spent tens of millions on applications.
Regarding overspending, that depends on your total budget. If they have a total budget of $150M, it’s not so much.
With regards to alt namespaces, I think they looked at the relative size of them and who was behind them, or at least that was my understanding.
.Cam was approved last time, so I don’t know whether .con will be rejected. There are a lot of conferences out there, so I see value in this domain. As far as .nil is concerned, do you think it’s similar to .net?
Thanks for the response, you make some good points – I hadn’t thought about .cam so maybe there is more hope for .con than I realised! I was thinking .nil is too close to .mil
Interesting insights Andrew and a great interview with Vaughn. Many congrats on your #600 show. Keep it going, very valuable!