Major US online retailer Overstock has announced that it has acquired all the assets of its bankrupt rival Bed Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million. Oddly enough, this news has a direct bearing on the domain industry. The fact is that Overstock has been trying to register the O.com for two decades.
As you know, the registration of single-letter names in the .COM zone was banned back in 1993 due to concerns that they could create conflicts with addresses in local networks. In the future, however, it turned out that these fears were somewhat exaggerated, and today the registration of one-letter names is allowed in most domain zones. But in the .COM zone, the ban remains in place, and there are only three single-letter domain names: q.com, x.com, and z.com, all of which were registered before the restrictions were introduced.
Since about 2004, Overstock has been constantly trying to get Verisign's registry, which manages the .COM gTLD, to get ICANN permission to register the O.com. And in 2018, this permission was obtained: on the condition that the domain name will be put up for auction, all proceeds from which will go to charitable purposes. Verisign was hardly pleased with this turn of events: it was obvious that the domain was worth many millions of dollars, but the registry was only owed $7.85 from its registration - the standard amount for registering a domain name at that time.
Perhaps for this reason, Verisign was in no hurry to organize the auction. Then the COVID-19 pandemic intervened, confusing all the cards of ICANN, Verisign, and Overstock. Well, now the probability of the auction looks completely negligible. According to Domain Incite, Overstock has announced a rebranding. It will change its name to Bed Bath & Beyond and move its website to bedbathandbeyond.com. As such, the company is no longer interested in acquiring the O.com. And there are simply no other applicants who are ready to pay big money for this domain.
