If you’re “into” ICANN policy stuff you’ll probably be aware of the ongoing spat between ICANN and a company that had bought one of Frank Schilling’s domain extensions.
A very very brief recap.
Schilling decided to divest himself of his interests in domain registries. So he decided to auction off most of the domain name extensions that he had under his UNR company. The auction apparently brought in more than $40 million.
Who bought what has been a little bit of a mystery ever since. While a couple of extensions are or were in the process of being moved to their new operators it appears that ICANN’s bureaucracy has stalled the entire process for .hiphop. And they are not happy!
It’s unclear how many of the other sold extensions are currently stalled, if any, but the people involved with .hiphop have made a point of going public about their issues with ICANN’s handling of things, which of course ICANN doesn’t agree with. As Jeff Neuman revealed in comments on CircleID the .hiphop sale was handled outside the main UNR auction. What has been intriguing is to see the line of questioning that ICANN has been taking.
Up until today it wasn’t clear who was behind the new play for .hiphop, but now today they’ve revealed who is involved.
In a press release this afternoon the new team behind .hiphop has been revealed as being Monte Cahn, Jeff Neuman and Ajene Watson. At the moment there are around 600 domains registered in the TLD.
It’ll be interesting to see what they’ll be able to do with .hiphop.
You can read the full release here.
