In the story with the fate of the .WEB, apparently, the last point has been made. According to the Domain Incite, the ICANN Board decided that the procedure and results of the auction for which the right to manage this domain zone was put up do not violate any rules and policies of the corporation. It might be worthwhile to briefly review the background given that the battle for the domain has been ongoing for 20 years.
In 2012, at the start of the first stage of the new domains program, 7 applications were submitted for the .WEB, which was considered as the main potential competitor of the .COM. The fate of the domain was decided by an auction, which, unexpectedly for everyone, was won by an unknown company Nu Dot Co (NDC), which offered a colossal sum of $135 million for the right to manage the domain zone.
Almost immediately it became known that NDC was financed by Verisign, to which the winner of the auction conceded control of the .WEB. This caused a storm of indignation on the part of the other applicants. The ICANN has attempted to back away from the decision by shifting the burden of responsibility to the US regulators. Those did not see any violations, but the company Afilias (one of the contenders for .WEB) demanded an independent review of the auction results. The decision of the independent panel turned out to be more in favor of Afilias: ICANN was required to compensate for all the costs of the proceedings (almost $ 1.2 million) and to decide on its own whether the participation of a shell company in the auction violated the rules and policies of the corporation.
It took the ICANN Board 16 months to finally formulate its position. But now it is known: the auction was held without any violations, and NDC has the right to dispose of the .WEB at its discretion - including transferring it to the management of Verisign. Verisign representatives have already stated that they fully endorse the ICANN Board's decision. No comments have been received from Afilas yet.
