Kieren Mc Carthy wrote an article on TheRegister.co.uk relating to Donuts winning the rights to .reise. Now .reise is already live, so Donuts picked up a registry with existing registrations and websites. Mc Carthy ponders what these types of deals could mean in the future ? One registry buying another and then raising prices.
I think that is the important question moving forward, will this shake up the future of the namespace ? Will Donuts eventually buy out a string in a niche they otherwise control, like sports related strings.
From the article:
The first new top-level domain name to be sold with live websites attached to it has been picked up by registry giant Donuts at auction.
The rights to sell domains under the name “.reise” – which is German for “travel” – represents a sea-change in the way the domain-name system will run in future, with generic top-level domains (gTLDs) becoming tradable assets rather than the core focus of a business.
Donuts paid an undisclosed sum for the gTLD, but bidding started at $400,000 and there were four bidders in the process. Donuts already runs the “.reisen” registry, and according to a report in Heise it was the main reason why the owner of “.reise” decided to sell up.
“[Owner Axel] Schwiersch had unexpectedly bad luck: the US TLD giant Donuts had secured almost the same suffix: dot-reisen,” Heise reports. “The US competitor was under better conditions at the start: due to a more favorable place at the draw, ‘.reisen’ could launch two weeks earlier. In addition, Donuts offered ‘.reisen’ domains much cheaper.”
As things stand today, there are 4,130 dot-reisen domains but just 1,320 dot-reise domains. In many respects the two extensions are equivalent in German.
Read the full article on The Register
