Major League Baseball (MLB) Wins the New Domain Extension .Baseball … - In what only can be described as win for the new gTLD program, Major League Baseball (MLB) has won the rights to operate the new domain name extension .Baseball. Donuts was the only other applicant. Donuts had won many sports extensions including .football, .Hockey, .Run and .Soccer. .Baseball was scheduled to go to a ICANN Last Resort Auction next week. Here is what MLB plans for the new gTLD  .Baseball according to its application with ICANN: Major League Baseball (“MLB”) is the oldest professional ... read more ...

Donuts Beats Google To .MBA; Google Wins .PHD - Two more new gTLD strings that were scheduled to go to a ICANN Last Resort Auction next week, have been settled privately. Donuts won rights to operate the .MBA new domain extension, beating out Google and a company known as Your Dot Phd, Inc. Yourdotphd.com Google won the rights to operate the new gTLD, .PHD beating out Your Dot Phd, Inc. There are plenty of new gTLD’s in the education vertical including .education,  .school, and .university all owned by Donuts  and .College which is owned by ... read more ...

UDRP Panel Denies TractorSupply.com Bid To Get Rights To The Word “Traveller” - Tractor Supply Co. of Texas, which has a long history of UDRP wins on “Tractor Supply” domains just lost its attempt to grab the new gTLD domain traveller.tools The one member panel of Andrew D. S. Lothian didn’t buy the argument that the tractor supply company also owned the exclusive rights to the generic term TRAVELLER. I think it’s an important case because had the panel found that Tractor Supply owned the rights to the word “Traveller”, based on the company’s avid defense of its ... read more ...

Jeff Sass Asks if ICANN Will Help with “Universal Awareness” - On February 11th during ICANN 52 in Singapore, The Domain Name Association (The DNA) hosted a breakfast meeting with its members and ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé. The 40+ minute video is worth a watch when you have some time, but I wanted to highlight a question asked by Jeff Sass, CMO of the .Club registry. Jeff asked if ICANN is going to contribute some resources in order to help with “universal awareness.” Jeff mentioned that The DNA has two primary objectives – universal ... read more ...

Domain name system expansion - It’s “the biggest change to the Internet since its inception” according to the President of the Generic Domains Division at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, (ICANN) referring to the expansion of the Domain Name System, the unique identifier with a set of properties attached to it so that your computer can convert a specific domain into an IP (Internet Protocol) ... read more ...

Amazon Wins The .Free New Domain Extension Beating Google, Donuts … - Amazon has won the rights to operate the .Free new gTLD. Amazon beat Google, Donuts, Minds +Machines, and Uniregistry in a private auction to win the rights to .Free .Free was scheduled to go to an ICANN Last Resort Auction later this month. Amazon already won the rights to the .buy new gTLD which is pretty much the opposite of .free It will be really interesting to see what Amazon plans to do with .free. Other than sometimes .free shipping I’m not sure what Amazon offers for free, except for a ... read more ...

Uniregisty Wins The New Domain Extension .Mom Beating Google & Rightside - Uniregistry has won a three way battle for the new gTLD .Mom. Both Google and United TLD Holdco Ltd. which is now Rightside, have withdrawn their application with ICANN. .Mom was scheduled to go to an ICANN Last Resort Auction later this month. Here is how Uniregistry describes the extension in their ICANN application for .Mom ʺGod could not be everywhere, so mothers were created.ʺ — Proverb Mothers are the most celebrated members of our society. They give birth, provide nurture and comfort, ... read more ...

Estimating Trademark Claims Notice Suppression of Non-Infringing New gTLD … - On February 2nd ICANN staff announced the release of a Draft Report: Rights Protection Mechanisms Review that is open for public comment until May 1st. This Draft Report is preliminary to an Issues Report requested by the GNSO Council that is due to be delivered by September 30th, and that may set the stage for a Policy Development Process (PDP) on Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) that could commence in 2016. Such a PDP could consider comprehensive reform of these RPMs as well as of the Uniform ... read more ...

The .DOCTOR Quarantine - ICANN should reconsider its decision to quarantine .DOCTOR, given that it's not even sick. In an utterly surprising move, ICANN staff and the Board's New gTLD Program Committee ("NGPC") recently informed the applicants for .DOCTOR that it has singled out the gTLD as a test case for controlling content and limiting speech on the Internet. In the epitome of top-down policy making, ICANN issued an edict that it will implement nearly year-old advice from the Government Advisory Committee ("GAC") ... read more ...

Is The Trademark Clearinghouse Causing New gTLD’s To Lose 6X The Number … - Phil Corwin of the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), just published a very interesting story on how the trademark clearinghouse (TMCH) program maybe negatively effecting the numbers of new gTLD’s registrations to a factor of 6X. Its a great read and I think Phil maybe on to something. As an unintended consequence of trying to protection legitimate trademark holders, there is a lot of game-playing at the TMCH where words like “the” “great”, “cool” “luxury” and hundreds of more ... read more ...

Donuts Wins Three Sports New gTLD’s; .Soccer Beating Out MLS & Wins … - Donuts has won the right to three sports related new gTLD’s. Donuts won the right to operate the .Hockey and .Run new domain extensions, beating the only other applicant in both cases Famous Four Media. Separately Donuts won the rights to what many consider the world’s the most popular sport .Soccer, beating out Soccer United Marketing, LLC better known as Major League Soccer, which is the Professional Soccer Language in the United States as well as Famous Four Media and Minds + Machines. The ... read more ...

Donuts Beats Coupons.com to the new gTLD .Coupons - Donuts has won yet another new gTLD beatings Coupons.com to the new gTLD .Coupons The new gTLD was scheduled to go to an ICANN Last Resort Auction later this month. If your wondering, yes there is also a .Coupon new gTLD Amazon beat out Minds + Machines in a private auction held around June of 2014, for the .Coupon extension. Based on how Coupons.com described itself in its application with ICANN, you really have to wonder how much the bidding got up to for Coupons.com to drop out. Coupons.com described ... read more ...

Auction of a live gTLD could pave way for domain-name shakeup - The first new top-level domain name to be sold with live websites attached to it has been picked up by registry giant Donuts at auction. The rights to sell domains under the name ".reise" – which is German for "travel" – represents a sea-change in the way the domain-name system will run in future, with generic top-level domains (gTLDs) becoming tradable assets rather than the core focus of a business. ... read more ...

Radix Assumes Full Ownership of .online - Radix, one of the leading registries in the new gTLD space, has reached an agreement with auction partners Tucows (NASDAQ:TCX; TSX:TC) and Namecheap to assume full ownership and operation of the .online TLD. Radix has already launched some of the most recognizable new gTLDs with .website, .host, .press and .space. With .online, they now own the first truly generic, truly global, viable alternative to .com. "Online" is the most commonly used word to end domain names, with over 550K .com ... read more ...

Choose a gTLD for Love or for Added Value? - The decision to bid for a new gTLD can be driven by reason or by love. Either the applicant practices strategic and financial valuation, or the applicant falls for an idea implicit in the gTLD. The second group had better be very lucky or have some motivation besides profit. They enjoy little chance of economic viability. Worse, they follow up their poor initial selection with similar bad calls about their marketing message. They listen to their hearts, and their hearts keep making things worse. ... read more ...