ICANN has published a paper arguing in favour of using auctions to decide between competing applicants for new generic top-level domain (gTLD) strings.
The paper says that auctions put “scarce resources into the hands of those who value them most” and “alternative allocation mechanisms such as comparative evaluations and lotteries inherently have much more severe limitations and defects”.
At its meeting in Paris in June, the ICANN Board agreed to press ahead with plans to open up the gTLD space to new applicants.
The paper was prepared by ICANN’s auction design consultant PowerAuctions.
Draft rules on the application process are likely to be published towards the end of this year.
They are likely to include more details about how an auction process would work if more than one applicant requests a particular gTLD.
ICANN has created a forum where comments can be posted until September 7.
