Since widespread release in July, .CO domain names have been publicly available for purchase, causing a domain name land grab by parties interested in snatching up short domain names no longer available with the .COM extension. Today, the real gold rush begins.
Coveted single letter domains have not been made available for individual purchase, but that changes today. .CO Internet S.A.S — the official operator of the new top level domain — will begin auctioning them off to the highest bidders, beginning with i.CO at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today.
Unfortunately, not just anyone can bid on i.CO; the auction will be privately held and only eligible bidders will be allowed to participate. The qualification process will begin today and end on January 21, 2011. Interested parties can register at the i.CO site.
i.CO is just the first of several single-letter private domain name auctions. Additional auctions will follow in early 2011.
More than 600,000 .CO domain names have been registered to date, but only a few single letter domains have been assigned. Twitter, for instance, is using t.co as their service-wide URL shortener, and Overstock.com will use o.co in its holiday television spots. Over the weekend, GoDaddy briefly tested making .CO domains the default choice for new registrations.
We anticipate that i.CO will likely command a final price tag in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — if not millions — range. The demand for single-letter domains is high, and with “i” signifying “Internet,” this one would certainly be appropriate for a number of big brand names.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ramihalim.
Reviews: Internet, Twitter, iStockphoto
More About: .co, .CO Internet S.A.S., auction, Domain Names, W2S2010
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