[NCUC-DISCUSS] Fwd: Results of the First New gTLD Auction | ICANN New gTLDs

Fri Jun 6 16:00:34 CEST 2014

This is good example of why people often don’t take civil society seriously.

You have here an incident in which a developing country bidder (Beijing Tele-Info network) just outbid a well-established, incumbent developed country company (Afilias). And Avri is moaning that an auction discriminates against developing countries!

We have direct evidence of the opposite of her claim. If this were based on a beauty contest, on a discretionary board decision based on <cough> “merit,” who do you think would have won – the incumbent with strong ties to ICANN staff and board, or the developing country?

Auctions are not a measure of “who has the most money,” Auctions measure who values something the most. I can have substantially less capital than you but value something more than you and either raise the money to outbid you or find the resources myself. I suspect that Afilias has more money than that Beijing company, they just didn’t value the ‘.info” domain in Chinese more than the Chinese company, based on their calculations of what they could make from the resource.

True, money is the measure of value here, and thus auctions are best for resolving contention among commercial parties, but making money is in fact what is going on with about 90% of the cases here. And in even noncommercial cases, when nonprofits lease office space, hire labor, buy professional services, etc, they are “bidding against” everyone else in the economy. No one thinks there should be a special community board to decide what the price of an office should be for the “special” case of noncommercial use.

Auctions look even better when you start comparing them to non-auction based contention resolution. If not auctions, what? Answer: pure politics. Lobbying, favor-mongering, corruption. All of which costs money. People who don’t like auctions typically have a quasi-religious belief that for any given name, there is One True Owner who has a God-given right to it, and a non-economic process can magically and without error locate that One True and Just Owner. I say that’s B.S.. The problem is that these religious claims, being, well, religious, cannot be resolved in any rational way.

From: ncuc-discuss-bounces at lists.ncuc.org [mailto:ncuc-discuss-bounces at lists.ncuc.org] On Behalf Of Eranga Samararathna
Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2014 3:51 AM
To: Avri Doria
Cc: NCUC-discuss
Subject: Re: [NCUC-DISCUSS] Fwd: Results of the First New gTLD Auction | ICANN New gTLDs

Hi,
Money should not be the last resort for resolution.
Eranga.

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:09 PM, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org<mailto:avri at acm.org>> wrote:

On 05-Jun-14 09:25, William Drake wrote:
> Economists love auctions and they do raise cash, but one wonders how
> suitable this procedure will be if we ever have contestation involving
> less well resourced applicants from developing countries, civil society,
> etc…
>
deep pockets win.
communities lose

but no one in power at ICANN cares about communities

and if there had been applicants from developing countries or , they
would also lose

and no one in power at ICANN cares about developing economies.

avri

> Bill
>
>> http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announcement-3-04jun14-en
>>
>>
>>   Results of the First New gTLD Auction
>>
>> On 4 June 2014 ICANN through its authorized auction services provider,
>> Power Auctions LLC <http://www.powerauctions.com/>, completed the
>> first auction to resolve a contention set for a new generic Top-level
>> Domain (gTLD) string. Contention sets are groups of applications for
>> identical or confusingly similar strings.
>> Two applicants, Afilias Limited and Beijing Tele-info Network
>> Technology Co., LTD. applied for the gTLD 信息, (xn--vuq861b), which
>> is a Chinese Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) for "information" or
>> "info." These two applicants were unable to resolve the contention set
>> between themselves, and thus proceeded to an auction, which is the
>> method of last resort to resolve string contentions as prescribed in
>> Module 4 of the Applicant Guidebook. Beijing Tele-info Network
>> Technology Co., LTD. prevailed in the auction for the winning price of
>> $600,000. Additional bidding information is available in the auction
>> report
>> <http://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/xn--vuq861b/xn--vuq861b-auction-results-04jun14-en.pdf>
>> [PDF, 225 KB]. Subject to payment of the Winning Price and meeting all
>> other criteria for eligibility, the winner will begin the contracting
>> process to sign a Registry Agreement to operate the 信息,
>> (xn--vuq861b) gTLD.
>> This was the first auction for the New gTLD program. Subsequent
>> auctions are scheduled
>> <http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/auctions/schedule-29may14-en.pdf>
>> [PDF, 306 KB] to occur on a monthly basis throughout 2014 and into
>> early 2015. The auction events are designed to accommodate resolving
>> multiple contention sets simultaneously.
>> For more information on Auctions visit
>> http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/auctions.
>> To view the current contention set status visit:
>> https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applicationstatus/stringcontentionstatus
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> David A. Olive
>> Vice President, Policy Development Support
>> General Manager, ICANN Regional Headquarters –Istanbul
>> Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
>>
>> Direct Line: +90.212.381.8727<tel:%2B90.212.381.8727>
>> Mobile:       + 1. 202.341.3611<tel:%2B%201.%20202.341.3611>
>> Email:  david.olive at icann.org<mailto:david.olive at icann.org> <mailto:david.olive at icann.org<mailto:david.olive at icann.org>>
>> www.icann.org<http://www.icann.org> <http://www.icann.org>
>> *
>> *
>>
>
> ***********************************************
> William J. Drake
> International Fellow & Lecturer
>   Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
>   University of Zurich, Switzerland
> Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency,
>   ICANN, www.ncuc.org<http://www.ncuc.org> <http://www.ncuc.org>
> william.drake at uzh.ch<mailto:william.drake at uzh.ch>
> <mailto:william.drake at uzh.ch<mailto:william.drake at uzh.ch>> (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com<mailto:wjdrake at gmail.com>
> <mailto:wjdrake at gmail.com<mailto:wjdrake at gmail.com>> (lists),
>   www.williamdrake.org<http://www.williamdrake.org> <http://www.williamdrake.org>
> ***********************************************
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