Uniregistry won the new gTLD private auction for .Auto beating out Donuts, long time domain name investor Jay Westerdal’s Fegistry, and Dot Auto LLC, which is associated with the company that operates .Uno
Donuts also won the new gTLD .Memorial beating Afilias and dotCOOL, which operates the new gTLD .Qpon.
Publicly traded Rightside (NAME) won the auction for .RIP which jointly owns certain new gTLD together with Donuts and operates Donuts registries backend.
Afilias also lost the auction to operate the IDN .信息 to Beijing Tele-info Network Technology Co, the only other applicant.
Afilias said in its application the IDN means “info”, and of course Afilias operates the .info registry.
However the winning applicant in its application said the IDN means: “knowledge or message in the form suitable for communications, storage, or processing, which is closely related to notions of form, meaning, pattern, perception, representation, and entropy.”
Uniregistry having won .Auto will have to compete against the new gTLD .Autos which was applied for by DERAutos, LLC, a Subsidiary of Dominion Enterprises.
There are also new gTLD applications for .Car and .Cars
.Car will be operated by Google’s Charleston Road Registry Inc. which was the sole applicant.
.Cars is still in contention, as far as we know, with Uniregistry, Donuts and DERCars, LLC , a Subsidiary of Dominion Enterprises being the three applicants.
However that string may have been settled in last weeks private auctions as well.