Afilias bid $135 million for rights to .web domain name.

There has been a lot of chatter after the $135 million .web auction as to who the second place bidder in the auction was.

I was skeptical of a report that it was Google. I was under the impression that it must have been Afilias, and that is now confirmed.

Afilias is asking (pdf) ICANN to void Nu Dot Co’s bid backed by Verisign and award the domain name to the second place bidder. In other words, Afilias.

Were Nu Dot Co’s bid voided and the auction not re-run, Afilias would pay somewhere between $57.5 million and $71.9 million for the domain, which was the third place bidder’s bid.

That’s an unlikely scenario. It’s going to take a court order or lawsuit settlement to force a change to the .web auction, and that would likely include re-running the auction.

Afilias announced last week that it bought .ski, .archi and .bio. Perhaps it used some of the money it had earmarked for .web to acquire these domains.

from http://domainnamewire.com/