Stephane Van Gelder

When you run a blog such as this one, where the author gives a personal view of the industry he's in, it's hard to decide whether you should talk about competitors or not.

I don't want to be second-guessing other people's professional decisions, but I do feel I can comment on them at times.

So it is with .CO.NL. The domain was bought by Eurodns and they've decided to market it as an extension in its own right. Now I can understand the allure for registrars in having and running their own extensions, but I must admit I don't get .CO.NL. There's already an official .NL and top level domains are always more desirable and usable than second level domains (i.e. I'd rather have INDOM.NL than INDOM.CO.NL).

The .CO.NL guys' pitch is that, because there's a local presence requirement for .NL, people will be able to project a Dutch image through CO.NL while bypassing the local presence rule.

The minute I saw that I thought: recipe for disaster!