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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-money dept.

Submitted via IRC for takyon

The curious tale of ICANN, Verisign, claims of subterfuge, and the $135m .Web dot-word

An ugly struggle over the .Web top-level domain may soon spill into public view again, after one of the companies vying for control of the dot-word demanded an independent review of DNS overlord ICANN's handling of the saga.

More than two years ago, the internet infrastructure industry was agape when an unknown company paid $135m for the rights to sell .web internet addresses: the sum paid was three times the previous record paid for a new dot-word, and seven times the average auction price for a top-level domain.

All that money went directly into the coffers of ICANN, a financial sum that was more than double its annual budget. That was unusual since the vast majority of previous similar dot-word auctions had been decided in private between the bidders themselves with the proceeds split among them.

It soon emerged that the unknown winner – a company called Nu Dot Co – had been secretly funded by the owner of the dot-com registry, Verisign. But before that information emerged, many in the industry were astonished when Nu Dot Co refused to agree to a private auction and insisted all the money go to ICANN.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:51PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:51PM (#772998)

    Just kill me, wtf is this shit?

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:09PM (2 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:09PM (#773085)

    Where have you been, under a rock for the last several years? This is not new news.

    A fourth version of the draft applicant guidebook (DAG4) was published in May 2011.[14] On June 20, 2011, ICANN's board voted to end most restrictions on the creation of generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) -- at which time 22 gTLDs were available.[15][16] Companies and organizations would be able to choose essentially arbitrary top-level Internet domains. The use of non-Latin characters (such as Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.) would also be allowed in gTLDs. ICANN began accepting applications for new gTLDs on January 12, 2012.[15] A survey by registrar Melbourne IT considered entertainment and financial services brands most likely to apply for new gTLDs for their brands.[17] The initial price to apply for a new gTLD was $185,000.[16] ICANN expected that the first batch of new gTLDs would be operational by September 2013.[18]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#New_top-level_domains [wikipedia.org]

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:25PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:25PM (#773094)

      I know about the new TLDs, I didn't know 'dot-word' was being used to mean 'TLD'.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:37PM (#773104)

        dot-words are a subclass of TLDs. Specifically, they refer to the latest batch of gTLDs issued by ICANN. This is to differentiate them from the other categories of gTLD, as the ones at the bidding process were supposed to be commonly used words, phrases, or abbreviations in an ISO recognized language.