The new Top-Level Domain (TLD) process is occupying a lot of people in the domain name industry at present. While some people are obviously very much against the entire concept of new TLDs, there are plenty of people and organisations who support the project. But what happens when you have more than one organisation vying for the same namespace? ...Seemingly the competition between two rival bids for .eco (doteco) has been getting more than a little dirty in the past few weeks. more
ICANN has operated on the fundamental principle that there should be separation within the domain name marketplace between registries (wholesale) and registrars (retail). This fundamental principle has been a pillar upon which ICANN has provided registrants (consumers) with increased choice, innovation, and price savings. Therefore it was with great surprise when ICANN staff unilaterally undertook this initial vertical separation analysis through exclusive consultation with ICANN contracting parties (registrars and registries), while totally excluding non-contracting parties (individual, business and non-commercial registrants)... more
Your corporate domain names send implicit messages (signals) through their Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and their second-level words. Shape your domain names so to send the right messages and to avoid sending unintentionally confusing messages. The post focuses on a framework to help bidders determine which TLDs send messages that are potentially profit generating... Soon TLDs such as ".car," ".cars," ".green," and ".eco" will be available to any qualified body whose request is favored by the allocation system. The system being discussed is a combination of beauty contests and auctions. more
VeriSign makes a great deal of money from the .COM and .NET registries. Can we tell how much they make, and how much that might change if the CFIT lawsuit succeeds? It's not hard to make some estimates from public information. The largest gTLD registry that VeriSign doesn't run is .ORG, which was transferred a few years ago to the Public Internet Registry (PIR) which pays Afilias to run the registry, and uses whatever is left over to support the Internet Society (ISOC)... more
Professor Denis Carlton was asked by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to submit a report on (or justify!) the impact of new top-level domains (TLDs) on industry competition. After he did so, Dr. Michael Kende posted an elaborate comment on the report on behalf of AT&T, to which Professor Carlton published a rebuttal. This essay outlines some of the errors in Professor Carlton's rebuttal and Dr. Kende's comments. more
Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break VeriSign's monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do? more
I read this to the ICANN Board Thursday morning, in Sydney, after more prep work than I care to recall. If you don't know that the DAGv3 is delayed, or what the IRT is, this is a good time to bush up on current ICANN state. "Good morning. My name is Eric Brunner-Williams, and I am speaking to you on behalf of the initial signatories of the Step-by-Step proposal. I represent one of the signatories as the principal of the native, aboriginal, and indigenous cultural and linguistic Top-Level Domain (TLD) project, one of many similar efforts to preserve living languages and cultures..." more
.ORG, The Public Interest Registry has, since its inception, advocated for policies designed to reflect the public interest, namely of fair and open competition that benefits not only .ORG, but all Internet users. ICANN is now faced with a critically important decision on whether to remove the trusted and proven safeguards that prevent domain name registrars from owning and operating domain name registries. Because of its concern for end users, support for the success for new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), and strong belief in the benefits of fair competition, .ORG vigorously opposes removing these critical safeguards and strongly supports registry-registrar separation... more
Some of the root server operators post public statistics for their domain name traffic at the top-level. For example, the graph (which can take a bit of time to generate, given ICANN's slow servers) for the L-root server's most popular Top-Level Domain (TLD) queries demonstrates, to no one's surprise, that .com is king. What's more interesting, though, especially given the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) debate, is to look at the most popular invalid (non-existent) TLDs. more
As I've been getting ready to catch my plane for ICANN 35 (Sydney), I can't help but thinking that there are a lot of things going down these days that will dramatically affect makeup of the Internet for years to come. Next year at this time, the root could be a very, very different place. A few of the items that will be getting deconstructed, discussed, debated Down Under are outlined below... more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.