back to article £CHING: ICANN bags $357m from 1,930 dot-word domains

Companies have rushed to file for top level domain names including .wang, .ketchup and .dog. A total of 1,930 applications for the new top level domains were filed, ICANN revealed yesterday as it published the list of applications. The name registry company will have scooped in $357m from the name sale, after charging $185,000 …

COMMENTS

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  1. FartingHippo
    Gimp

    Omission?

    .milf

    A money-spinner for sure.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Unacceptable face of capitalism?

    No chance some of these will be thrown out as too generic - not when cash is involved.

    (.skin would be useful for a pr0n site.)

    1. Ian Yates
      Stop

      Re: Unacceptable face of capitalism?

      The whole thing is a scam. Why do we need these? Why not just allow multilingual equivalents of the current TLDs?

      What's the chance Mr A. Non. Phisher has asked for ".corn"?

      Madness. I can see no benefit to the Internet from any of this.

      1. Anonymous C0ward

        Re: Unacceptable face of capitalism?

        .corn went to a Mr G. Giant, I believe.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ICANN = ISCAM?

    er, thats it...

  4. Victor Ludorum
    Thumb Up

    "Meanwhile, Zodiac Leo Ltd has applied for .wang."

    $185000 - That's Numberwang!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Someone has 307 applications

    That's quite a long list.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Juicy spam list

    I was thinking what a nice juicy spam list that unfettered list of email addresses makes - if ICANN had some, I don't know, 'common-sense' then perhaps a little obfuscation would have been kind to those folks in the list who have some interesting emails to look forward to.

  7. Phil Endecott

    BBC

    Is it true that the Beed have spent $185,000 of license-fee-payers' dosh for .bbc ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Go

      Re: BBC

      Ridiculous! $187k is the application fee - but they've followed Industry Best Practice and used ¡Bong! Consulting for the application. So it'll be around £350k (+VAT)

    2. Christian Berger

      Re: BBC

      Well I know that is a lot of money and its completely insane, but to keep things in perspective, that's just one good HDTV studio camera with lens.

      But still, throwing the equivalent value of a camera which would have otherwise been in service for 20 years out of the window simply is stupid.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: BBC

        Not neccesarily. The BBC recently killed off a lot of domains they own[ed] as a cash saving exersise. If they own .bbc they get to as many/anything.bbc all for one sigle price.

        Now, I don't know if this will actually be a saving or not in terms of the cost of owning the gTLD compared to the myriad of other domains currently in use, but it ought to save the cost of at least one full time employee who only job is/was to keep track of renewals :-)

  8. Notas Badoff
    WTF?

    .fail fail?

    Somebody paid $185,000 applying for the chance to .fail? I... can't quite grasp the stupidity of the imagined brilliance...

    1. Nigel 11
      Meh

      Re: .fail fail?

      I presume they'll be selling subdomains. If 18,500 businesses pay $10 for their name.fail to prevent anyone else using it to disparage their products, then the TLD will be turning a profit.

      Wonder how much the'll ask for epic.fail?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So that's $185,000 * how many words in the dictionary? even before lawyer fees.

  10. JS Greenwood
    Facepalm

    As somebody...

    ...who is the named contact for a GTLD application, I can confirm that within 24hrs of the 'unveiling' of applications, I am already suffering inbox meltdown from TLD-pseudo-spam. Many, many companies offering domain related services, consulting, etc. And requests for interviews on the submission.

    I'd like to say "I ICANNot believe they put peoples emails addresses up for all and sundry to harvest". But, given the way the rest of the process is being handled, sadly, ICANN. *groan*

    1. frank ly

      Re: As somebody...

      You should have used a disposable Yahoo e-mail address for the application.

      1. Irongut
        FAIL

        Re: As somebody...

        And then he'd have been turned down for not being big or professional enough to have a propper email adress.

        1. frank ly

          Re: As somebody...

          Ok... set up and use icannstuff@mydomain.com, filter everything to go to spam unless it's from icann.com (or whatever they use). This is the technique I use to get rid of 99.99% of spam sent to my 'mydomain' email addresses. I also use yahoo adresses and autoforward them to a collector address at my 'mydomain' email address, with similar filtering techniques.

          1. JS Greenwood

            Re: As somebody...

            Yep,

            I proposed we do just this - set up a specific gtld[at]large-corporate-entity.com email address. Apparently, that was a little too difficult to achieve.

            Their actually publishing them is ridiculous, though - they'll either be real and therefore spammed, or a largely unmonitored account... which makes all their notifications about problems with submissions, changes in status, etc. lost to the electronic trash can. Ho hum.

            Back to my archery practice... =/

          2. Gannon (J.) Dick
            Pint

            @frank ly

            You're an ICANN kind of guy, Frank.

            I liked the part about cybersquatting on Libya's ccTLD. Nice touch.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    glad to see all those email addresses

    now to harvest them for the scammers

  12. Trollslayer
    Holmes

    Spot the squatters

    There are less than six squatters there, at $185k a go someone is putting in a lot of money.

  13. Anonymous C0ward

    "Google and Amazon are also fighting it out for .free and .book."

    I was wondering if Facebook would go for .book so they could use face.book. Maybe they got .bitch instead.

  14. John Sanders
    Facepalm

    Free money.

    The whole DNS industry is a free money printing machine.

    And a Joke also.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Free money.

      Well in a nutshell DNS is all about getting different entities to talk together. The only reason why company X can send E-mail to company Y is because there's DNS. The alternative would be lots of negotiations by lawyers... DNS is comparatively cheap. It's the lesser evil.

      1. P. Lee

        Re: Free money.

        Except that these tlds are not about connectivity, they are about marketing. Which has a whole separate budget.

        Bad luck for those who used random internal TLDs on the assumption that you'd never see them on the internet.

  15. St3n
    WTF?

    wtf

    Why would anyone register a tld after a product that may not even be around in 5 years time?!?!?

    1. Pete the not so great
      Happy

      Re: wtf

      .WTF good one!

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