Donuts has amended its lawsuit against ICANN and demands $22.5 million for the .Web domain. This is Donut’s continuing legal battle with ICANN. The amended complaint (pdf) is filed in the federal district court in California.
Last week, the auction for .web, which closed for a record $135 million, the company had attempted to stop the auction because there was a change of control at applicant Nu Dot Co. The company suspected that another company was bankrolling Nu Dot Co’s application. Eight applicants participated in the .WEB/.WEBS auction.
The amended complaint reads:
VeriSign’s apparent acquisition of NDC’s application rights was an attempt to avoid allegations of anti-competitive conduct and antitrust violations in applying to operate the .WEB gTLD, which is widely viewed by industry analysts as the strongest competitor to the .COM and .NET gTLDs.
In the complaint, Donuts alleges breach of contract, negligence, unfair competition and other claims. It reads:
ICANN allowed a third party to make an eleventh-hour end run around the application process to the detriment of Plaintiff, the other legitimate applicants for the .WEB gTLD and the Internet community at large.
…
ICANN intentionally failed to abide by its obligations to conduct a full and open investigation into NDC’s admission because it was in ICANN’s interest that the .WEB contention set be resolved by way of an ICANN auction.
It remains to be seen how the court will rule on the amended complaint. ICANN has collected over $230 million as proceeds from New gTLD program auctions.