In a set of private new gTLD auctions held last week Donuts has won at least 4 of them, beating out Amazon Uniregistry, Minds + Machines for the new gTLD .Video (Google did not apply for .Video, but did apply for .Tube).
We should also note their was no new gTLD application submitted for .Videos. If Amazon, Uniregistry or Minds + Machines had applied for the plural .Videos, which arguably is a better string instead of .Video, they would have won it for just the $185,000 application fee.
All three other applicants for .Video have withdrawn their application as reflected on ICANN’s website.
Donuts won .Sale as Uniregistry, Famous Four, Dot-Sale, LLC whose website was at saledomain.name withdrew their applications.
I believe Dot-Sale LLC was the only applicant who used a .name address in it application of the 1,930 applications filed.
A similar Donuts extension .Deals enters the Early Access Program (EAP) this week ahead of its general availability next week.
Donuts added .Money to its list of new gTLD’s to go with .Cash which has already launched, as Famous Four dropped their application.
Finally PRIMER NIVEL S.A. of Panama withdrew it application for .Legal, leaving Donuts the only remaining bidder.
Donuts/Rightside now has won .Attorney, .Lawyer and .Legal, leaving only .Law, which I consider as the best of that vertical, as the last string in contention (.Esq was applied for just by Google and .abogado, spanish for lawyer was applied for by just Minds + Machines).
There has not been any announcement of any prices paid, however Minds + Machines which is a publicly traded company typically issues a press release after all private auctions held in a set are finalized, laying out which gTLD’s they won, which they lost and the net effect on the books of the company .
I know there was at least two more and possibly several more new gTLD private auctions held last week, so we know we don’t have all the results yet.
I doubt that an applicant would have been awarded .videos, much less taken it for only the $185,000 application fee. It is likely that an application for .videos would not have passed the Initial Evaluation successfully. If it had passed, a successful string-confusion objection to the plural should be found. Although most string contentions have been found in favor of the applicant, objectors have been most successful when contesting a plural of their domain. n the case of .videos, considering video is also used often as a plural of itself, there exists a likelihood of string confusion higher than .sport/sports, perhaps even the “paradigm example” of .game/.games. Now that .video can establish itself, a .videos will not pass in a future round of new TLD awards unless the string-confusion standards that favor existing TLDs are changed. The chance that the .video domain is operated in such a manner as to get itself delisted from the root, thereby providing an opening for a future .videos application, is so unlikely I consider it be almost an impossibility.
If both .car and .cars are permitted, will it not be grand when .cars reserves the second-level domain car.cars and .car reserves the domain cars.car? Tell that one to people on the street, and they will think one has gone mad.
I think there are 22 instances of singular and plural strings and all have been granted
Nothing would stop a .videos from being applied for in the next round and certainly will be applied for
Yes there is a .car and .cars and .auto and .autos
Most of those plurals, however, did not have objections filed against them by the singular applicant. When they were so objected to by the singular, plurals have fared quite poorly. There were a total of nine cases where objections were filed by an applicant for the singular domain: .sports, .pets., .webs, .cars, .hotels, .games, .kids, .homes, .and.tours. .Supplies was not objected to by .supply, but by .shop, which lost its objections against both domains. As they are in a different language, .hotels (Spanish) and .hoteis (Portuguese) were found to not to be English plurals of .hotel. And the limited planned use of .tvs led to the finding that it also is not a plural of .tv, but a reference the applicant TVS company.
Of these nine string-contention sets, only .hotels won, and that case has the least amount of actual analysis of any listed. Bruce Belding gave no explanation or analysis as to how he found .hotels to be sufficiently visually and aurally different than .hotel, especially when the string similarity was at a whopping 81%, which he somehow actually construed as favoring dissimilarity. I would like to know how much money the .hotels “expert” that Belding found persuasive brought with him, because this summary decision, if not a matter of ignorance of the standards or incompetence in applying them, smells as terribly as it reads.
The objector to .homes came to an arrangement to withdraw its objection, and similarly, .kids did not respond to the objections against it. We could consider those a wash if one prefers. .Cars remains an open question, but it has lost 2 out of 3 cases so far, so if one had to categorize it, .cars has been defeated so far. And .sports, .pets., .webs, .games, and .tours all lost.
I think that .videos is similar to .sports than and would have a higher visual, aural, and algorithmic similarity to .video than .games had to .game, and similar to .sport, the term video often refers to more than one individual video. the algorithmic similarity between .video and .videos is 82%, higher than any of the denied domains listed above. .Pets had a 72% (called “high”) similarity and lost, .sports lost at 81%, .webs 72%, and .games and tours were both at 78%. While .accountants and .coupons were at 88% and 82% respectively, and .homes was at 81%, again no objections were filed in those cases, nor was there one filed against .autos.
And both lawyer and attorney have significantly more search volume than law, both individually and with the expected premium second-level domains: criminal, business, contracts, probate, property, torts, accident, labor, employment, etc. so I am curious as to why you prefer .law?
.Law is three letters
some people misspell those words.
Attorney and Lawyer are not terms used in every language or country
in England they are barristers for example.
.Law is more universal in my opinion.
If your talking about in use in the US there are certain areas of law where one (attorney/lawyer) is used more frequently by than the other.
for example someone who practices tax law usually refers to themselves as a tax attorney not tax lawyer, Trial Lawyers is preferred to Trial Attorneys.
.Law is simpler.