Million Dollar Auction Results and the Possible Big Russian Domain Freeze
Bid prices have routinely crossed over the six-figure threshhold and even into the seven-figures in the NIC.ru auction of the new .РФ (“.RF” in English) Russian ccTLD.
The current bid status of a sampling of high-flying auctions is as follows:
квартиры.рф / $10,000,000 / “Apartments”
вода.рф / $1,222,220 / “Water”
телефон.рф / $450,010 / “Phone”
бизнес.рф / $330,060 / “Business”
автомобили.рф / $319,997 / “Cars”
золото.рф / $300,015 / “Gold”
игры.рф / $269,996 / “Games”
билеты.рф/$200,020 / “Tickets”
цветы.рф/$110,050 / “Flowers”
рестораны.рф / $110,001 / “Restaurants”
автомобиль.рф / $100,150 / “Car”
отели.рф / $100,051 / “Hotels”
отель.рф / $100,005 / “Hotel”
It is a bit curious that during the registry’s open registration period the registrar NIC.ru secured nearly half of initially registered .РФ names. Where there were multiple NIC.ru customers who preregistered a name, NIC.ru held an auction (as shown above). The .РФ registry publically vented its frustration with Nic.ru’s auction process stating that the auction process encouraged cybersquatting.
Moreover, according to today’s Moscow News, NIC.ru is also under investigation by the “Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) [which] launched legal action against six registrars from the agency, claiming they had broken competition laws” by unlawfully collaborating with NIC.ru in securing names.
As NIC.ru has been ordered to stop auctions, and has proceeded with them it is unclear what will happen next. Hopefully, innocent auction participants will not have their names seized or frozen as they have committed no wrongdoing. Instead, if the allegations are true, the registrar alone should be penalized for its transgressions via a monetary penalty.
Unfortunately, a fantastically successful IDN ccTLD launch has been clouded by the above allegations and other questionable activities.
Kudos to DomainIncite.com for excellent initial coverage of the scandal and potential domain freeze here.
I think there’s one clear detail demonstrating what the problem was. Somehow, between the “big” registry and the sub-registries, the latter were able to “buy” the domains and put them on auction which would obviously garner them a huge profit (when they only paid $40 to begin with and held their own auctions). Clearly, this should not be allowed and surely this is what they are looking into. “B”, the sub-registry, is supposed to be a miiddle-man for “C”, the end-user. “B” saw the profit potential and took advantage of “A” AND “C”, buying from one and selling to the other. Partly “A”"s fault. Not enough sanctions to prevent that. Kinda marred what seemed like a phenomenal launch..
Just another point. That $10,000,000 purchase of “apartments” seems a bit bogus. The biggest strictly domain purchase in the world, as far as I know, was sex.com for 13,000,000. An IDN at Landrush for $10,000,000?! I wish it were a fact (would be great for IDNS in general) but we’ll have to wait and see until they sort this out.
Actually, the more I think about it the more this situation resembles almost every other registry. Acquiring names and putting a big price tag on them is par for the course for most registries. Why do we see a lot of great names at “premium” prices at these registrars? They can catch any name they want and charge what they want. Is .rf so different?
“It is a bit curious that during the registry’s open registration period the registrar NIC.ru secured nearly half of initially registered .РФ names. Where there were multiple NIC.ru customers who preregistered a name”
I dont understand what the big deal is. nic.ru told me in advance if there were multiple preregistrations, then the names would be secured (if possible) in the name of a specified nic.ru proxy for the first year.
What am I missing???
[...] IDNblog.com is reporting the apartments.rf asking price, and a reader was kind enough to send me a screenshot of the concrete.rf auction. [...]
@Em – Good point about the $10 million dollar bid as it is unclear yet whether the bid will be paid off.
@NIC – The “curious” fact is that one registrar secured nearly half of the names which is a surprisingly high percent. I agree that all users were notified that when there are multiple preregistrations that there would be an auction — so nothing surprising there.
золото.рф (gold.RF) sold for >$300M
Source of information – one of bidders.
But again “it is unclear yet whether the bid will be paid off” =)
chat.rf (ЧАТ.РФ) sold yesterday for $10,000,000
50 bidders.