Amazon has apparently participated in its 1st new gTLD private auction losing .Group to Donuts.
There were 5 applicants for the new gTLD .Group
Amazon (AMZN)
Donuts
Top Level Design, LLC (Raymond King .Wiki & .ink)
Straat.co (related to former owner of the .Co Registry)
Tucows.com (TCX)
All applications other than the Donuts application for .Group have been withdrawn from ICANN’s site.
I haven’t seen any announcements from the two public companies in this auction or from anyone else.
I believe with 5 applicants this may be the largest contention set to be resolved by a private auction.
As far as I know it is also the first private auction for both Amazon and Straat.
Although some in the community believed that Amazon or Google would win every auction they were in be it a private auction or the ICANN last Resort auction, I have long-held the opinion that Amazon and Google are not going to pay an unlimited amount for each of the strings they applied for and that they would, like other large applicants, wind up getting outbid on some strings.
That appears to be the case with .Group
serious free money on tap then
Amazon has a market cap of what – $170 Billion? Maybe the Company just decided the .group opportunity wasn’t worth it.
Well, Donuts has to win these auctions because obtaining these gtlds is the only reason they are in business.
Interesting, it certainly looks like there is going to be big advantages in scale, i.e. it is at the point where Donuts is perhaps the only registry with genuine bargaining when negotiating with Godaddy. They can probably do better deals and have lower costs than any other registry. Would probably expect them to win a lot more.
Alternatively amazon may have little interest in running tlds. But to protect its position, either spoil the show with closed tlds or similar, or at least pick up free money itself from potential rivals.
A big part of the value of some tlds is a potentially crushing advantage in the provision of online services to your field. Group they won’t be too bothered about but will be interesting to see whether amazon is more circumspect when it comes to shop/store.
It will be interesting to see if the Big Guns (Giant companies who are applicants) stay in the fight for rights to secure these: .app, .cloud, .web. I’d include .mobile, but that one might be redundant with most everything to be “mobile”.
Anybody who gambles in regular bidding games MUST set a precedent early on for walking away. Otherwise, they’ll face larger expenses in subsequent negotiations / auctions.
That’s especially true in scenarios where the losing bidders are paid in proportion to the final bid and thus have an incentive to promote bidding wars against players with big budgets who are on record never backing down.