**ESPN markets ESPN.mobi on ESPN.com**

[pinkybrand]

Hi Pinky, great to have you as a member here at DNF.

I have visited your site and obviously you must be classed as both a .mobi 'expert' and a .mobi 'insider'. So I wonder please can you tell us any of the following:

What the plans are for .mobi auctions at Sedo after the debacle of the last auction and subsequent unlawful re-run auction

Has agreement on settlement yet been reached with those domainers who were treated so diabolically in the last Sedo .mobi auction?

How are the remaining reserved names going to be sold off?

When are the remaining reserved names going to be sold off?

Thanks in advance for any information you can give us here.

Bill

Hi Bill,

Not to be snooty or anything, but as a privately-held company we don't typically reveal business dealings with any particular vendor (or auction vendor) in advance, so I can't disclose when our next online auction will take place, or with whom. But stay tuned on that---online auctions have proven they can work, and I suspect any new TLD applicants are watching very closely how this is all playing out.

As far as what has happened related to the last SEDO auction, my colleague Caroline Greer has posted on that at blog.mobi in the past few days, so you can read about it there. It was a very complex situation that has never really occurred in this industry in the 12 years I've been it. We are all blazing new trails here. I work with Caroline quite closely, and I can tell you she spent and untold amount of hours working with all concerned parties on the matter.

As you may know our Reserved Names are different from our Premium Names in how they get to be allocated, if ever. We have some exciting things going on with the Reserved City Names process. In the near future we hope to announce what we've got going on with those.

As far as other Reserved Names go, there are some names that will likely never be allocated. I'm talking mostly about ICANN and Internet infrastructure type names, along with numeric names that equal emergency codes in certain areas of the world, etc. Otherwise it is not out of the question that other Reserved Names might become available at some point, but the process to make that happen is more complex than in how we decide to release certain Premium Names.

 

[Bill Roy]

Hi Pinky,

Thanks for the quick response, it is appreciated.

As I think you gathered it was 'reserved' and not actually the 'premium' domains I was interested in knowing about, and yes it is specifically the geo .mobi's. I had heard a whisper of something soon to be announced, so I was just trying to tease any info out of you I could. (Can't blame me for trying! k: )