ICANN published rules for its Last Resort auction last night.
To bid in an auction each applicant will have to put up 10% of its maximum bid and if they want to bid an unlimited amount or more than $20 Million they have to put up $2 million per string.
Under the rules applicants will not be able to ‘”share” the deposit (although once concluded the money can be moved to another auction) theoretically if an applicant for a large number of applications in contention wanted the ability to bid over $20M per string they are going to have to come up with a lot of money just to bid.
Consider Uniregistry which has 41 of its applications under contention, if they wanted to bid an unlimited amount for each string they would have to come up with over $80 million just in deposits assuming all the auctions were held in within a short time frame.
That’s a lot of money.
Maybe more interestedly, is that ICANN left unanswered many issues raised six weeks ago by Valideus which is private company “currently managing 5% of all new gTLD applications”, including Amazon’s, which sent a letter to ICANN bring to its “attention a number of questions/concerns regarding the auction process that may be shared by a range of applicants.” on ICANN’s “Last Resort Auctions” While some of the issues in the letter were address indirectly by ICANN under the proposed rules many issues raised in the letter remain unanswered:
Applicants may need to make a series of dynamic auction decisions on the basis of eventualities in multiple concurrent auctions (i.e., they may adjust what they are willing to spend in real-time, and may not be able to tie up an as-yet unknown amount for uncapped bidding authority). Again, while respecting confidentiality of deposit amounts, where applicants have not elected the uncapped bidding option, in recognition of the fact that it may be necessary to revisit auction strategies in real-time, what opportunities does ICANN propose to provide applicants for bidding authority beyond the auction cap corresponding to the 10% deposit-related auction limit?
The rules issued last night do not seem to allow additional deposited to be submitted during the auction process. To bid in an auction each applicant will have to put up 10% of its maximum bid and if they want to bid an unlimited amount or more than $20 Million they have to put up $2 million per string.…
