.NYC celebrated its one year anniversary yesterday by releasing over 16,000 domain names which were previously unavailable due to being placed on the ICANN collision list.
We ran the list through a whois program earlier today and according to the results somewhere around 650 of these domain names got registered.
If you have ever gone through an ICANN collision list a substantial percentage of the list contains a lot of nonsensical domains, containing random letters and/or numbers or are otherwise are not domain suitable for registration.
To their credit .NYC could have pulled off the best of the collision domain names and put them up on SnapNames.com for auction (where the Landrush domains for .NYC were auctioned) in which case they would have generated a lot more than the $35 or average registration price.
.NYC however passed on the auction idea and let them all fly as a drop on a true 1st come, 1st served fashion.
Although the release was promised to be staggered over a 2 hour period, chatting with a couple of registrars and registrants it seems all the domains were made available around 3 and by 3:30 and the drop was finished.
Neustar (NSR) manages the .NYC extension on behalf of the city of New York.
