Tuesday, June 30. 2009
Reading about a new gTLD initiative or just hearing it mentioned doesn't necessarily make it real. So if anyone has any bona fide information on projects like .BAIRES (for Argentina's Buenos Aires), .MUNICH or .ARAB, I'd love to hear from you.
These may be concrete, some even have a website (e.g. www.dot-arab.org, which doesn't seem to work), but anyone can register a domain name and make a gTLD initiative look real. However it takes a little more than that to carve out a real TLD plan. Financing for example, or having actual people involved in it and planning it…
So how about it Dot BAIRES, Dot MUNICH or Dot ARAB? Are you for real?
Monday, June 29. 2009
"Welcome to Sero Registry. We are the official registry of the .HOMES, .ARTIST, .TEAM, .VIDEOS, .SELL, and .WIKI Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs)."
Came across this little gem of a website the other day. I suppose it was inevitable that the new gTLDs would attract people who don't have a problem being economical with the truth.
Or am I being too harsh on this Sero concern? After all, I haven't contacted them to get their side of the story. But I cannot help but be dubious when I read the following on their website: "Sero gTLDs currently resolve through an independent DNS network (…) In the near future we will be working with ICANN and the community to bring our gTLDs to a wider audience. Stay Tuned!"
I think you might need to stay tuned for a while before seeing these "Sero domains" becoming real in any way.
Wednesday, June 24. 2009
Kurt Pritz, Senior Vice President of Services at ICANN, gave details on the projected timeline for the rollout of new gTLDs during the GNSO Council's meeting in Sydney today.
He also spoke on the ccTLD IDN fast-track process which is running parallel.
It now seems that process will come to fruition first. The ICANN Board is set to approve it at the Seoul meeting in October. If this is done, those countries that are ready to launch their IDN ccTLD (China and Russia are said to be anxious to do so) can then expect to do so mid 2010.
Kurt Pritz then gave his own personal estimate of when the first of the new gTLDs might come online. Expectations are for validation to take between 4 and 5 months. As the Board would then have to sign off on applications, the whole process could take up to 7 months.
As ICANN is currently working to open the first application cycle in February 2010, that would then mean that the earliest of the new gTLDs could be active on the Internet by the end of 2010.
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
Italian capital Rome is the latest major city to declare an interest in its own Top Level Domain. The .ROMA initiative is actually not an official push by the city's government, but the result of efforts by a Roman entrepreneur to get his hometown on the CityTLD map.
Massimo Ralli has set up Roma TLD Srl to champion the request for a .ROMA. Massimo is known within the domain industry as cofounder of the Italian domain analysis company Domainsbot. I discussed the .ROMA initiative with one of his associates during the Sydney ICANN meeting and learned that although a .ROME had also been considered and that it may be the way the city is known by many internationally, it was inconceivable for Romans to refer to anything other than "Roma" as the name of their city.
Massimo is currently working to get the Rome mayor's endorsement.
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
Basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal is endorsing a request for the creation of a .BASKETBALL TLD. In a video being shown by Minds And Machines, Shaq, who describes himself as an avid Internet, Facebook and Twitter user, says .BASKETBALL would be the ideal TLD for both fans of the sport to follow their favourite players and for those players to keep in touch with their fan base.
Wednesday, June 17. 2009
I've just been made aware of a second .ECO initiative. I've talked before about Dot Eco LLC's project, which scored a major coup when it got former US vice president Al Gore to support it.
The second .ECO is championed by a for-profit Canadian company called Big Room Inc. Although the three founders aren't ICANN regulars, they are backed by at least 2 domain industry insiders: the inevitable Laga/Deloitte and Afilias.
So 2 .ECOs, plus the other eco friendly TLD project .GREEN, that's a lot of people vying for the same seat! You could almost be forgiven for thinking that being green is all the rage at the moment…
Monday, June 15. 2009
A series of consultations to be held around the world this summer will address the new gTLD program and more specifically, solutions to a number of issues such as trademark protection and malicious conduct.
The consultations will start at next week's ICANN meeting. For those unable to attend, two further sessions are scheduled in New York (13 July) and London (15 July). Each time, ICANN staff and members of the IRT will be on hand to provide feedback on work currently underway as part of the new gTLD program.
Two further outreach sessions have been announced, in Honk Kong on July 24 and in Abu-Dhabi at a later date which has yet to be confirmed. There, the onus will be more on the issue of IDN (i.e. non-ASCII character domain names) new gTLDs.
Wednesday, June 10. 2009
Have a look at the ICANN blog and you'll see a post by ICANN Director of Media Affairs Brad White. The post is about a survey commissioned in England by a registrar called Gandi. The survey, carried out by The Future Laboratory, questioned 100 UK businesses about the new gTLDs. The result, as touted by the survey, is that "Two-thirds of the 100 UK businesses surveyed are still unaware that liberalisation (of the Internet) is happening."
Brad is clearly irked by this one-sided portrayal of the survey's results. "From my perspective, a number of reporters “buried the lead” when they reported on this new study (…) of 100 UK businesses surveyed, 81 percent say the gTLD expansion will be innovative, and 75 percent say it will be advantageous," he writes on the ICANN Blog.
While Brad's ire is understandable, he should not be surprised by the survey results. I know Gandi boss Stephan Ramoin and I think he's done great things with Gandi since taking over the company a few years back. But he's always come across as being strongly anti new gTLDs. So I would not expect a survey commissioned by the company he runs to be anything but negative about them.
Monday, June 8. 2009
Should the City of New York launch a .NYC Internet domain? To try and answer that question, the City issued a Request For Information (RFI) in April through its Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT).
The RFI was just that: a call for help in determining whether the City should work on a .NYC project and if so, what the TLD should be. Contrary to what people normally expect from these RFIs, it was not a call for vendors to detail and offer their prospective services.
The City was quite clear in its call, explaining that "no contract will be awarded pursuant to this RFI and that responding to, or not responding to, this RFI will neither increase nor decrease any vendor’s chance of being awarded a contract from a subsequent solicitation issued by the City, if any, for relevant services."
DoITT invited several companies to respond to their RFI by the end of May. INDOM was the only non-US company to get the call and to respond to it. From what we know, the City received 5 others responses, all from US companies. Long-time proponents of .NYC Connecting.nyc and dotNYC both responded, as did Neustar, Verisign and New York based Name.Space.
We responded in the hope that our experience on .PARIS and other TLD projects may help the City of New York plan for a .NYC. We believe that sharing information like this can only help the City TLD cause in general. As more and more major cities like New York get on the City TLD bandwagon, this particular type of TLD is fast emerging as a standalone new category. One that can only increase the pressure on ICANN to launch the new gTLD program sooner rather than later.
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