Tuesday, July 28. 2009
That's the service on offer from YourSiteCan.BE. The site sports a search box designed to allow any combination of a domain name and a TLD to be queried. If the query returns an "available", then you may elect to pay $8.99.
What are you buying? Not the domain name of course, since no new TLDs have been launched yet. Just the right for the requested domain not to be listed as "available" any longer on this specific website. Yes, that's right, for your 9 bucks you get the privilege of blocking a fictitious domain name from being listed on YourSiteCan.BE!
Customers will also be informed when (or if) the new TLD they have searched becomes available. This so they can come back to YourSiteCan.BE and pay extra, should they want to actually register the name.
Reading the site's FAQ, they make no false claims. They do not claim to be registering domains. They do mention that if the domain being searched for does become available one day, they may not be able to register it.
So in reality, they are not doing anything untoward. Just selling a blocking service on their own site, and information on the launch of new TLDs that is bound to be available from a multitude of sources once it does happen. Amazing the kind of business ideas that new TLDs are generating…
Monday, July 27. 2009
In a recent article on the proposed expansion of the Internet through the creation of new Top Level Domains, Forbes.com paints a balanced picture of what this could mean for the future of the web.
It's nice to see the "mainstream media" taking a positive look at the wealth of opportunities new TLDs might open up. Of course, concerns such as cost and the protection of intellectual property rights are also part of the article, as they should be.
But with an intro which talks about the dot-com era giving way to the world of the dot-brand, Forbes clearly understands what could be at stake here. "What does that mean?" asks author Laurie Burkitt. "Houston's police department can drop its clunky Web address, www.houstontx.gov/police/index, and switch to police.houston."
Exactly.
The Forbes piece does raise one worry with me however. ICANN VP Paul Levins is quoted as saying "It's likely that companies may band together to form domain groups (…) cellular phone companies may police the ".mobile" name."
I sure hope that's a misquote. If not, the guys at .MOBI may not take too kindly to a senior member of the ICANN staff listing as an example of a possible new gTLD a domain so close to their own…
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