A second auction organized by ICANN took place. Applicants for these new gTLDs couldn’t manage to make an agreement among them. The difference between auctions of ICANN and private ones is that after the later lost parties do receive some money paid by the winner. In ICANN auction all of the money goes to corporation’s budget.
On this auction the fate of domains .BUY, .TECH and .VIP was decided. As a result Amazon became operator of .BUY domain, it offered $4 588 888, more than Google, Donuts and Famous Four Media. Dot Domain .TECH went to Dot Tech LLC ($6 760 000, lost bidders - Google, Minds + Machines, Donuts, NU DOT CO and Uniregistry). Domain .VIP sold to Minds + Machines ($3 000 888, lost parties - Google, Donuts, I-Registry and VIP Registry).
Sums of money paid by the winners are close to the ones projected by experts and are significantly bigger than the bids of the first auction that took place in June. Back then domain .信息 went to Amazon for only $600 thousand. In total second auction brought ICANN $14.3 million. Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, said that these funds would be reserved in a special fund until the Board of the Corporation together with representatives of Internet community approves the plan how to use them. One of the ideas in particular is to use these funds to develop Internet infrastructure in the poorest regions of the planet or to subsidize applicants for new top-level domains from these regions.
