ICANN auction was conducted yesterday. It resolved string contention for two new generic top-level domains - .BABY and .MLS. Six companies applied for the .BABY domain, five of them are leaders on the domain market – Donuts, Google, Radix, Famous Four and Minds + Machines. The last applicant is the biggest manufacturer of cosmetic and sanitary products for children Johnson & Johnson Services Inc. It was Johnson & Johnson that got it with the winning price of $3,088,888.
The name of the .MLS domain is an abbreviation which means multiple listing service – popular real estate listings aggregation in North America. Representatives of the domain market won the domain. $3,359,000 was offered by the Canadian Real Estate Association, beating another applicant Afilias.
Thus, in both cases the winning bid was offered not by the active players of the domain market willing to replenish their portfolios, but by representatives of the specific businesses. In a sense, it can be said that the new domains were received by those who needed them most.
