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During the sunrise period for .eu domains there was quite a bit of controversy, as a number of high profile names were grabbed by companies that had no legitimate right to them.
One of the domains that caught my attention at the time was dublin.eu (see Irish Times article).
So what about the .tel sunrise?
Were companies like Lantec, who grabbed the dublin.eu domain, actively seeking high profile names this time round?
Well the answer is pretty obvious—they were.
Dublin.tel received two applications during the .tel sunrise and the second one was successful.
So Dublin city won’t be able to make use of the domain dublin.tel unless they either buy the domain from Lantec or are successful in a WIPO UDRP.
Whose fault is this?
Telnic‘s? No. Their process for validating sunrise applications was clearly followed, so blaming them is pointless. Lantec, like any other sunrise applicant, had to provide trademark information in order to apply for the domain.
ICANN’s? No. They’d nothing to do with it.
Dublin city? That depends on your perspective. They probably should have applied for the domain or made representation to the registry to get the domain name added to the reserve list.
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or….. Dublin City should be going simply for dublin.ie, which they have and which is ranked #3 in Google.
Why would they also have to go for Dublin.* ?
.tel might be an ‘odd’ TLD of course, but then still, why would a city (or for that matter every other entity on this planet and beyond) have to bother with registering every single
.* that exists?
I don’t get the .tel thing anyway at all, Individually:
“Manage all the ways people can reach you in a single place that’s yours forever”
dom.tel can be ‘taken’ from me just like dom.
“Protect your private data”
“Take back control of your personal information and share it securely”
By publishing it in DNS? :) Yeah right! As long as there is no authentication and I don’t know who is asking for the data and exactly know and can control how they store the retrieved data there is nothing that ‘protects my private data’.
“... all without the need to build, host or manage a website.”
Because now instead of having to type myspace.com, linkedin.com, xing.com etc, I just type .tel, alrighty I see why :)
and for Businesses:
“Join a global online directory that provides you instant worldwide exposure…”
Isn’t DNS not already a ‘global directory’, and HEY under the ‘individual’ header they say they keep data private, not expose it to the world ;)
.... rest seems like an advertisement for the Yellow Pages but now online and from an unknown party who instead of scourging this data from the web with spiders in the Google way, let you pay so that you can put your data in their database, great business case indeed :)
Jeroen
Have a read of my post about why .tel is a fantastic and useful concept before jumping to misinformed conclusions:
Why .tel rocks
Regards
Michele
From that text “Imagine if you could add micheleneylon.tel to your address book once and never have to update it manually ever again.”
Well, unless i forget to pay the bill or there is some freak accident, I will never ever loose unfix.org either, which is totally in my control and can serve exactly those DNS records that .tel serves. The TLD itself is nothing special. That they ask for you to give them structured data which they control though in their TLD, that combo is new; there are other systems like the broken “Open Directory Project” which do this already for a long time (though only urls there, not your birthdate, phonenumber, address etc and they only publish that on the web, but XML is available there too if you want.
That they use DNS as a universal directory is IMHO silly, as they could also have used HTTPS+XML for that, which would also allowed them to do proper authentication so that you at least know who is fetching your data, and you can then log it too, which is nearly impossible with DNS (as recursive/caches means you don’t see the originator).
“celebrity.tel. If you navigate to Hollywood > Jessica Alba you can then see what data they have for her on their system, which is really sweet.”
Amazing, there are links to websites containing data. Google does that much better for me.
The funniest thing of course is do I need to use jessica-alba.hollywood.celebrity.tel or jessica-alba.celebrity.tel or jessica-alba.tel or jessicaalba.tel or ??? Indeed DNS doesn’t allow you to solve that puzzle unless they place a wildcard in there. Next to that there is no authority on the information, thus is that domain really THE Jessica Alba, or is it that girl from across the street with the same name? And is that hollywood in California or hollywood in india? Same issue as with .berlin. When you have finally found and determined that it is the person you want and that person actually keeps their data there up-to-date, then it might be partially useful, but seeing that people don’t do that on a variety of other social networking sites I don’t see that happening here either. As such, Google is still the best way to go, which is universal and doesn’t require lock-in to one single place (one can use other search engines and you will find people too).
As said, great marketing ploy, it doesn’t catch me though.
BTW: No DNSSEC on all this .tel stuff, thus how do you know that the answer you got is correct (assuming that the data stored is?)
Dublin.eu is parked and is, I suppose, for sale indeed. Word “Dublin” is too much of a generic one to be fought for in the court. It is like word “air” in air.eu.
Irish may be now interested in Dublin.Me and Irish.Me domains. They do jingle and obvious.ly sound so much better.