By: RH

Uniregistry will not use Premium Auctions

One of the most interesting comments from the Frank Schilling post on new tlds, was his reply to @domains, who asked him, "What will you do with the gtlds your group is awarded, become a registrar and sell the registrations, give away free and make money through ads, or …?"

Frank replied,

"We have different plans and pricing for our assorted TLDS and those are public in Question 18 and the other public portions of our applications. We always planned to offer everything in a land rush – without premium auctions, on a first-come, first-served basis, with a not for profit sunrise. You just don’t do that if you aren’t passionate about the very long-term and far sighted success of your extensions. So if you wanted to register domain names in our new TLDS you would get some good ones at registration price on opening day. We have a plan for metered access so it would be a challenge to game us and sweep the good ones up. Our prices are fixed and only indexed to inflation after 5 years.. But in light of the Google applications, I can see many applicants throwing their playbook out the window. I could absolutely see a world where we had to pay 20 or 30 million dollars for a clutch of desirable strings and then be forced to give away second level registrations for 5 years until a plan revealed itself, using the profits from our other businesses and from niche higher value strings to subsidize the fixed-costs and ICANN fees from those free offerings. Everything is in play. We may partner with a larger strategic – with another media co – but we have the cash and ongoing cash-flow from other operations to go it alone. I think we’re the only applicant other than the big extremely wealthy publicly traded ones with that luxury."

If that is true then Frank is giving the average domainer a good shot to get some good domains. Of course a lot can change from now til then and auctions may be needed to bring some initial money in. It is nice that Frank is at least trying to even the playing field for the average new tld investor.