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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, @09:49PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:49PM (#773114)

    I replied elsewhere, but it may not be visible:

    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.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:57PM (#773121)

    Thanks for correcting my incorrect assumption.