This was discussed at DomainState too. I imagine .om and .co will be next.

When thinking of new gTLDs, I want first dibs on .coom, .cmo and .como. :)

I poked around the .cm TLD and found some interesting stuff which I wrote up in this blog entry.

did anyone try mtv.mtv.com ? or something like in that area ?

Alex, since the top level {*.cm} has been wildcarded, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ... etc levels will all provide results that make it look as if the domain typed in actually exists.  http://mtv.mtv.cm works.

My attempts to connect to the SMTP and POP3 ports for a made-up domain

You could say the only “trademark” that is being typo-squatted here is “.com”.  And since no one has a trademark on “.com”, there is no UDRP dispute or trademark suit possible here.

These are not “registrations”, so specific trademarks are not being singled out for treatment.  Every string is being treated equally, whether or not it is recognizable in a written language somewhere as a trademark.

I also do not see any “stability” issues here that would lead to systems breaking down because of the wildcard behavior.

I can see how clumsy fingers could cause a lot of traffic to hit the .cm servers.  They didn’t ask for it.  But it is up to them to decide how to handle it.  right?

There are some who would call this a public service.

One suggestion: they could eliminate possible confusion by announcing themselves:  “Welcome to the .cm top-level domain.  We notice that you might be challenged in your typing! “. 

Tom Barrett
EnCirca, Inc

With respect to Ram’s comment, it’s just an A record that points to a web server, so any other attempted connection with fail. They published SPF -all records to discourage people from sending or receiving mail, for whatever good that will do.

The trademark issue is more serious, since it is quite clear that the Canadian web site the wildcard points to is deliberately benefiting from typos.  If I were the owner of a .com web site with a famous mark such as amazon.com or espn.com, I would not be amused.

Tom, I’ve seen plenty of trademark suits for names that are trademarked ending with a “.com”...

I looked up the A record for google.cm to see if it had been cached in major ISPs around the world - an empirical test of the popularity of the .cm wildcard.  Doesn’t seem all that popular as yet, but it’s early days still:

Germany: [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Ireland: [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Israel:  [No cached answer: Would go to NS of cm.]
Italy:  [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
UK: BT Broadband & BT Yahoo A=72.51.27.58 [TTL=10m 29s]
UK: Easynet Ltd. [No cached answer: Would go to NS of cm.]
US: ATT Worldnet [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
US: Mindspring #2 A=72.51.27.58 [TTL=12m 34s]
US: UUNet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of cm.]

Courtesy dnsstuff.com

Google.cm is a top 100,000 Alexa site (which likely means 5,000+ visitors/day).

Extrapolate that to all domains, and I would not be surprised if that traffic is worth at least $3 million/yr.

Ram,

You might check the TTL on existing .cm registrations (of which google.cm is a rare exception).

As George points out, other metrics suggest monster traffic:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Searches done in June 2006
Count Search Term
27189 myspace.cm

By way of comparison, a popular domain like taliban.com received, yesterday, 78 visitors.  If use as a search term is any indication of accidentaly typing into the search bar, instead of the address bar, then myspace.cm alone must be generating a great deal of traffic.

(And, yes, I realize that there are people who believe it would be more “socially useful” if the Taliban had taliban.com, rather than someone who is simply “squatting” on the name.  Unlike those anti-squatters, I cannot see the usefulness of supporting terrorism.  Perhaps someone can explain it to me.)

These are not “registrations”, so specific trademarks are not being singled out for treatment.  Every string is being treated equally, whether or not it is recognizable in a written language somewhere as a trademark.

But, Tom, that is also true of domains registered by the “domain tasters”.  They are not singling out trademarks either, but are auto-registering based on various search feeds they receive - and those strings are treated equally, whether or not they are recognizable somewhere as trademarks.

Lack of intent is indeed one of the points on which the cybersquatting claim against Dotster hinges.  I guarantee you that if you are testing 200K domains a week, you are testing more non-trademark relevant strings than trademark-relevant strings.

So I punched in a few comparables against some of the world’s most popular .com domains.  The growth in traffic (per Alexa) is noticeable.

Site     3 mos. Change
————-!———————
Yahoo.cm—-  162,464 up 96,079
MSN.cm   —- 1,306,656 up 702,853
Google.cm—-  97,576 up 9,582
Baidu.cm —- 508,062 up 418,506
ebay.cm —-2,148,031 up 908,224
cnn.cm   —-1,266,192 up 743,540
youtube.cm—- 1,030,527

-Ram

John, I am not sure you can write “Cameroon has now

wild-carded its ccTLD.”
Their policy has always been open, and did not change for a long time. I remember I was contemplating whether I should register a .cm domain name (CM are my initials…) in the beginning of this century, and the registration rules were the same as today.

It’s not germane to this disucssion whether anyone can get a .CM name; what has changed is that even if you don’t have one, or if none has been registered, it will still resolve on the web.

Try cedric.cm, a website that works automagically!

My wrong! I thought “wild-carded” in this context meant “opened”. My apologies!

I think that the BIND root-delegation-only option was added specifically to deal with the Verisign .com issue, but it nicely handles this one as well.
http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/delegation-only.html contains a suggested list of exceptions, and .cm is not on that list. Anyone running BIND that was bothered enough about the Verisign issue would have installed this long ago.

I poked around looking for more TLD wildcards, and found
quite a few of them.

Each of you must help me to change what is wrong.

Mr. Noumbi,

“Wrong” can be a very subjective term.  It is not clear that anyone is doing anything “wrong” here.

There are some people who believe that the practice of providing a “parking page” for unused domain names is wrong.

There are other people who believe that providing something in response to an unused name is better than nothing.  Indeed, there is browser software which does this, and there are recursive DNS providers (e.g. OpenDNS), which do this.

There are still other people who believe that providing a search function in response to a URL which contains a trade or service mark valid anywhere in the world, should not be done at any place in the world.

There are also legal, technical, and moral definitions of “wrong”.  I personally do not believe that what is happening in .com is legally or morally wrong.  I defer to those with deeper understanding of the relevant RFC’s to determine whether what is happening is “wrong” in some technical sense.

As far as the image of Cameroon is concerned, I am sure there is no one who seriously would argue that Cameroon should not exploit its various assets to maximum economic advantage, and there are probably many who envy or admire this development.

If anything, it certainly has attracted attention to the .cm top-level domain, and there is a saying that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

Typo correction: I meant “what is happening in .cm”, not “what is happening in .com”.

Of all of the embarassing mistakes to make in this context…

Mr. Noumbi,
Given that you have a position of responsibility in your country, you don’t really need the approval of anyone else outside of your country to change the policy of your ccTLD registry.

If you would like to change local policy, you should connect with your country’s registry provider (camtel) and your country’s Government Advisory Committee representative, who is:

Mr Norbert Nkuipou
Director of the New Information and Communications Technologies
Monitoring Unit
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

according to the ICANN GAC website.

Regards,
Ram

Mr Noumbi,

One must keep the perspective that the internet is simply a computer network.  As a social force, it is what people choose to make of it.  Human nature remains more consistent than technology, and some professions are much older than engineering.

I believe you will find that Camtel is receiving a share of the revenue from the advertising, and your suggestion that such revenue be used for socially beneficial purposes in Cameroon, however one might choose to define that, is certainly a good idea.  Presumably, as Camtel is a government agency, then by at least one definition of “socially beneficial” then we might presume that the revenue is being used according to the degree to which the Cameroon government represents the political will of its people.

Oh, and in addition, you could chat with your local Internet Society (ISOC) chapter - they may have an opinion on this, and may be able to help you.

Area:Cameroon
Name:Internet Society Chapter of Cameroon
Contact:Vitalia Mungvi Ngala
Email:[email protected]
Web site:
Notes:Chartered April 2000

Source: ISOC website

all domains including monster.cm , flowers.cm seem to be down.
anyone has more info on the recent developments?

The wildcard is back on.

And in response to your original post John, We give users the tools they need to decide how they want it to work for them: nxdomain, have it redirect .cm to .com as a typo correction or be a wildcard as it is now.

-david

I’m not surprised that someone figured out the FAQ:

This service is specifically authorised by the sovereign Republic of Cameroon, and will be used to produce revenue for the Republic of Cameroon.

...which is certainly a laudable purpose, and which may help obtain some good quality curtains for a change.

I would estimate annual revenue at the low end to be at least 1% of Cameroon’s currently reported foreign exchange reserve.

We all know what the FAQ on the wildcard page says. But I’m not sure how much of it I believe.  Your estimate of $10M/yr for the clickthroughs is plausible, but what we don’t know is how much if any of that is going back to Cameroon, and how much if any of the amount that gets to Cameroon is spent on something useful.  My guesses would be precious little, and none.

Since the operators of the wildcard page decline to identify themselves, and we have yet to find anyone in a responsible position in Cameroon who is aware of this, the whole thing smells fishy to me.

I have to agree with John Levine.  Furthermore, if this is being done by the Government of Cameroon, why all the secrecy?  It only benefits from more transparency. I still view the entire operation as suspect.  Even if the Government of Cameroon is behind this, how much money will make it to the Cameroonian people?

-david

how much if any of the amount that gets to Cameroon is spent on something useful

Yes, the last people who should be deciding what to do with money in Cameroon are Cameroonians.  It’s a good thing the world is arranged in such a way to keep them from having too much, or they might do foolish things with it.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05308/600836.stm
Google Inc.‘s two billionaire founders, both 32 years old, will soon be cruising the skies in a Boeing 767 wide-body airliner. They bought the used plane earlier this year, Mr. Page says.
[...]
As for what they plan to do with it, Mr. Page wouldn’t be specific. He says “part of the equation for this sort of machinery is to be able to take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world.”

Perhaps the Cameroonians should just donate the money to Google, so that Mr. Page can grace them with the presence of wise white people.  It’s good for them.

Even if the Government of Cameroon is behind this, how much money will make it to the Cameroonian people?

Good point, David.  My dividend check for the .us ccTLD must be late this month.  I’ll have to look into that.

My, aren’t we snarky this morning. I presume most people can tell the difference between a national government and a private business, so I won’t belabor the irrelevance of what Google’s owners do. 

But I will point out that the economic history of Africa since 1960 has been a consistent pattern of westerners providing aid and loans for development which instead disappear into the Swiss bank accounts of the local leaders.  Cameroon isn’t the most corrupt country in Africa, but it isn’t the least, either.  Cameroon is a poor country with an infant mortality rate ten times that of its former colonial powers.  It has 2 million phones for 17 million people, compared to 75 million phones for 60 million people in France.

If the typosquat money is building rural cybercafés so cocoa farmers can check commodity prices and is connecting rural clinics for telemedicine, that’s great.  If, as seems more likely, most of it is ending up in a bank account in Vancouver and the rest in Zurich, that stinks.

I was doing some follow-up on this and the wildcard seems to be down again; was there some resolution on it?

But there are some good typosquats up. Try http://www.youtube.cm.

As everybody noticed, wildcards in “.cm” are gone but, since yesterday, there is a new wildcard in “.tm”.

Wildcards in “.cm” were activated again on January 19th and seem to stay this time.