Any idea how this process manages abuse?
What prevents me from bidding just $500,000 (if I had $500,000) to a TLD that I know is popular just to make money from the winner?
What prevents me from bidding just $500,000 (if I had $500,000) to a TLD that I know is popular just to make money from the winner?
2 parties, the winning bid needs to be at least $370,000
4 parties: $740,000
8 parties: $1,480,000
16 parties: $2,960,000
and so on.
However, if people go into this simply to game the system, that means that each party needs to be able to bid at least the winning bid (because to make your money back, you need to be able to push the bid to that number), which means for 16 parties, you've now tied up $2,960,000 * 16 = ~ 50 million dollars in cash. And that's only to break even on the application fee.
In addition to this, each applicant has to prove that they have the know-how and technical resources to run the gTLD[0]. Finally, the money you submit, will be in escrow for close to 9 months[1], which would make this incredibly infeasible as a money making system.
[0] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...
[1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs... (section 2.7)
The fact that you pay a $185,000 fee first. And then in order to make your $500,000 bid, you have to put that money in escrow.
And then, you might accidentally remain the highest bidder and lose all that money in exchange for your shiny new tld.
Sounds ripe for abuse if you ask me.
On top of that, think about how many people inside Automattic knew about their bid. The board at least. Any one of those people could have told a friend that WP was going to bid for it. Would you not have instantly put in a small bid of $200,000 if you'd known about this and had the cash?
As the registrar, you can choose to not sell any domain names at all other than the ones you choose to use yourself.
I'm far from an expert but I can't see how what you say is compatible with the ICANN's TLD Registry Agreement (especially section 2.9 and the whole of article 5).