Google Registry in its comment filed on the ICANN Last Resort says ICANN plan to conduct all of the Last Resort Auctions within one year is too long.
Google wants the ICANN Last Resort Auctions to be all held within 6 months.
Uniregistry told ICANN in its comment filed on the subject, that one year was too short of a period.
Google Registry also makes a very good point that under the proposed ICANN Last Result Auction rules, there is a 30 days prohibition, once the date of a Last Resort auction is scheduled, from the parties to the auction to communicate.
In the case of applicants that have a many strings in contention like Google, if they are in an auction for March for one string, lets say against Amazon, Donuts, Famous Four and Top Level Domain Holdings they would be barred from talking to each other about any other strings they had applied for thereby eliminating the possibility of private auctions for many other strings that are not scheduled for auction.
Here is Google Registry’s letter to ICANN:Duration of Auction Process Still Too Long
ICANN has stated that the public auction process will not last longer than one year.
We feel that this is still too long to wait for all string contentions to be resolved especially given the late stage we are in within the new gTLD program.
While it is understood that ICANN may be trying to promote other means of resolving contentions by constructing less than advantageous auction conditions, in many situations we expect that contention sets will be required to proceed to ICANN auction, especially given that an entire contention set must agree to a designated path forward (e.g., all must agree to do a private auction or all must agree to form a partnership, etc.).
We feel a more appropriate time window is to have all auctions completed within six months, which would still allow ICANN ample time to carry out auction events while at the same time not significantly disadvantaging applicants with higher draw numbers.
B. Timing between Auction Rounds is Still Too Short
ICANN has set the initial auction round time at 30 minutes and all subsequent rounds at 20 minutes.
We appreciate the increase in time ICANN has provided (up from 10 minutes) in this draft, but still feel that more time is needed.
In some situations, Applicants will be making decisions potentially impacting millions of dollars and 20 minutes is simply not a sufficient amount of time to make these kinds of decisions.
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