CircleID

Our editor Chad made a similar point in his Editorial earlier this week, mentioning that there are little reasons to purchase .CM domains for anything else but potential typo traffic, considering Internet penetration in Cameroon only is between 2-4% so far and the renewal fees of at least $175 seem too high for local residents. I should mention though that they registry was at least discussing plans to use the foreign registrations in order to subsidize local domain name purchases.

Obviously there are groups that will benefit from the .cm and others that stand to lose. I don’t see any economic social benefits.

Without going into calculation of social vs. private benefits, there are three instruments to fight back:

1.  Market Solutions:
(a) Activism against secondary marketplaces, parking companies, and promoters of the TLD.

(b) A carrot-and-stick cooperative brand-sharing regime in the spirit of the one proposed for second-level domains.

2.  Legislation: Make domain names, including the TLD, trademarkable. We have at least one attempt, namely Yahoo’s Y.com. What provisions are there to prevent registering new TLDs that are typos for ccTLDs?

The relatively high registration cost of $175 is practically irrelevant if there exists a lower price that makes the .cm a viable business.

I am sure there are other solutions should we care to tackle the issue.