ICM Registry has become the only applicant for new gTLD .sex after Internet Marketing Solutions Limited withdrew its competing application. Apparently, applicants have made a deal. Various sources even name the amount of money paid by ICM to the competitor for giving up – between $2 million and $3 million.
This amount of money in any case is not a lot, considering that second-level domain sex.xxx only a couple of months ago was sold for the same 3 million, price of the domain sex.com at the time reached $13 million. Probably, the cost of transaction was influenced by the fact that some time ago ICANN for no particular reason stopped the process of delegation of “adult” domains .sex, .porn and .adult. ICM Registry is optimistic, it seems, if it decided to pay the competitor in this situation.
However, if domains are eventually delegated, costs of ICM will be paid off handsomely. In this case the company will administer all “adult” domains in the global network. Apart from .sex, .porn and .adult, the company manages already existing domain .xxx.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet, reminded that ICANN has recently finished the process of preliminary assessment of all applications that it received during the New gTLD program. “Now starts a new stage - working with domain zones that have more than one application. These disputes last for a long time and the result is unpredictable and apparently this is the reason why companies decided to resolve the issue on their own. Moreover, it is quite possible that the second applicant has changed its plans or got disappointed in the project and that is why it has agreed on this deal relatively easy. The transaction amount indirectly states that - this is how much the project of creation of a new domain zone costs, so the company just recovered the costs”, she said.
