I like Auction #6 Contention Set 11
On the new internet, everybody will know you're a .dog.
Internet registry Afilias hopes to build a $100m (£62.3m) war chest by floating on the London Stock Exchange – just in time to spend the cash snapping up the rights to new dot-word domains. The company will sell 30 percent of itself next month, ahead of a critical dot-word auction planned for 17 December. Some 21 valuable new …
That's not at all bad, 3x is common sandwich-shop stuff, this is monopoly land-grab territory. And look at the nonsense like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat valuations - this isn't a bad horse to back if you think some of their tld's are going to be popular.
As for the eventual value of .whatever, I guess we'll see if anyone really uses them, or if they're just vanity domains (I have my suspicions already)
"As for the eventual value of .whatever, I guess we'll see if anyone really uses them, or if they're just vanity domains"
Not to mention protection racket domains - whereby well known brands (and even smaller companies) are compelled buy theirname/trademark.newTLD to protect them from misuse.
"(I have my suspicions already)"
Ditto.
" [no] appreciable difference to the majority of Internet users. They'll just stuff the search term into Google
Agreed, that is what I do. The very fact that organisations will buy up their own domain name under all possible TLD's (maybe ibm.dot-vip, ibm.london, ibm.pet, ibm.rocking-horse-shit etc) shows that these extensions have no meaning already. Jeez, I own a ".me.uk" website and I don't have a clue what the ".me" stands for and I don't care either.
The only significant thing, possibly, is a national name in the TLD. If I am looking for a plumber I won't want one with a TLD of .nz because they would probably charge an extremely high call-out fee.