ICANN to auction new gTLDs

Just came across this nice news article:

ICANN has just published a paper from its contractor PowerAuctions LLC, regarding the use of auctions to award new Top Level Domains (TLD) strings in case of contention.

I can understand what ICANN wants to avoid. In the past, it has been criticized for using the “beauty contest” model with the redelegation of the .net TLD. It was finally “redelegated” to its incumbent operator, although it was obvious to many industry observers that other bidders were as good, if not better on several points. There was a large part of subjectivity in the decision, simply because beauty criteria are a very personal matter.

 http://www.circleid.com

Even though it is a good first step, but still it doesn’t appear to be the only criteria to award the new generic top level domain extensions. ICANN can still ask for other things from the applicants. Given the track record of ICANN, I won’t be surprised to see them ditch this auction or at least make it irrelevant to overall gTLD selection process.

ICANN has shown the domain registrants how it can ignore them when it renewed the dot-com registry’s contract at a huge cost increase to the domain registrants.

Domain registrants cried, pleaded but ICANN did not care about them.

I won’t be surprised to find complete ChAoS during this new process.

In fact, I love this quote from the CircleID.com author Patrick Vande Walle who just sums it up so nicely:

Advice to those early proposers: keep some cash to pay your lawyer’s fees and get some undisputable proof you came up with the idea first. There’s going to be blood, sweat and tears. Those who are going to steal your idea will hold no quarter.

I am not holding my breath when it comes to ICANN