In the end of last week a closed private auction was held. But the companies that participated applied for different domains. In was the first precedent of a kind.
We are talking about domains .PET and .PETS, differing by just one letter. They are a singular and a plural form of the same word. Applicants for domain .PET were companies Afilias and Google, the applicant for .PETS was Donuts. ICANN String Confusion Objection panel decided in august last year that domains were too similar in spelling and pronunciation and this was why they couldn’t coexist in the network at the same time. However, none of contesters wanted to withdraw the application, so the auction not only determined the winning company but also the name of the domain to be included in the DNS root zone.
The winner of the auction is the company Afilias that will administer .PET domain. The sum paid by the winner traditionally in not disclosed.
