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.TEL ramps up PR ahead of 2009 launch
Tuesday, September 9. 2008
Expect to hear a lot about .TEL in the next few days. Registry Telnic has been promoting the suffix at San Diego's Demo conference this week. The result is a string of news stories in papers like the Financial Times.
I really like the concept of a unique identifier behind .TEL and the clever way in which it takes an existing system – in this case the DNS – and gives it a new twist. But I have to admit that the benefits of .TEL aren't easy to explain to non-domain experts.
So Telnic are right to get the general media to explain it for them. Outside of our closed world of domain name professionals, people tend to talk normally instead of slipping a juicy bit of jargon like "zonefile" in every other sentence. That can only help everyday Internet users who don't care about what makes .TEL work and just want to get the best out of a good product.
.MOBI alive and kicking
Tuesday, September 9. 2008
DomainesInfo is running a little scoop today. They've learned from mTLD, the .MOBI registry, that the extension has now reached the magic ton, i.e. a million domains.
I have to put this in the context of another story I read on .MOBI a few days ago. Writing for the ClickZ Network, Rebecca Lieb argued quite simply that .MOBI is already dead!
How ironic, then, that days later the registry is set to officially publish registration numbers that most of the world's Internet suffixes can only dream of reaching one day.
The rationale behind Lieb's statement does, however, kind of click. She says that the latest mobile navigation devices such as Apple's iPhone make .MOBI redundant. Because users can upload standard web pages on such devices and therefore don't need specific web content designed for them, it's simpler for them and website publishers to stick with just the one extension (use only a .COM for example instead of having an additional .MOBI for small screens).
Is this really the case? I have an iPhone and I must admit I have never used it to go to a .MOBI website. But it's also true that many a time while browsing the web on my iPhone, I have wished for iPhone-specific content. Despite the iPhone's clever technology and big screen (for a phone), you're still not accessing the web in its natural environment.
So there it is. I think there's a clear case for .MOBI and that it's actually one of the most useful concepts for a new extension because it has a well-defined purpose. What do you think?
Oh dear .ME!
Monday, July 21. 2008
It seems that the .ME landrush hasn't gone well. Many prospective .ME registrants have not been awarded the names they were after, and the registry system itself seems to have lost track of reality and started awarding the same domains to several registrants.
A Washington Post article claims that registrants have had their credit cards charged by GoDaddy, who has partnered with Afilias to launch .ME, even though they didn't get the name(s) they were after.
The problem appears to be bigger than expected demand for .ME and an inability for GoDaddy's servers to keep up with it. I find that extremely worrying if that's true, considering the millions of domains said company currently has under management. Should we expect their servers to crash under that load as well?
A plethora of new extensions
Sunday, June 22. 2008
Several proposals for new gTLDs were highlighted in Paris, during the EGENI 2008 meeting just before this week's ICANN meeting. Among the new suffixes that could see the light of day there's a .SPORT, a .QUEBEC, a .MED and even a .NAI for "North American Indigenous", i.e. North America's native Indians.
New York wants to be a part of it
Thursday, June 12. 2008
The New York Times reports on the .NYC initiative in an article about the Connectingnyc initiative. The push for the creation of a .NYC comes at a time when "City TLDs", that is suffixes created to represent specific towns or cities around the world, are all the rage. The .BERLIN and .PARIS projects are already well known and others are apparently afoot as well. NY City obviously wants to be a part of that.
As INDOM is involved in the .PARIS project, I was very interested to learn a little more about the .NYC application. The rationale is the same as that for .PARIS or .BERLIN: making the global Internet a little more local for specific uses like tourism or city services for example. Read the .NYC article here.
Getting revved up about .CAR
Friday, May 23. 2008
Let me start this post by saying that I am a total car nut. That might help you understand why I'm so excited to hear about a proposal for a new gTLD that would be called .CAR.
The proposal comes from ATX, a firm I'd never heard of (and perhaps that's also the point of the .CAR proposal: a publicity stunt) but which claims to be "the world's largest independent telematics services provider to the automotive industry", whatever that means.
The rationale behind .CAR is very similar to .MOBI's. The idea is to have an extension for content designed specifically for use in the automotive environment. "Browsing the Internet in the vehicle is a unique environment with unique characteristics," says ATX. The proposal also stretches to the possible use of .CAT sites in conjunction with onboard vehicle data such as performance, maintenance or location data.
Don't know how serious .CAR, but I love the idea of web content designed specifically for in-car browsing…
England wants its own domain
Wednesday, April 23. 2008
After reading this post's title, your first thought is probably "the English already have their own domain with .CO.UK, don't they?"
Well it appears they don't agree. An online petition has been launched the persuade ICANN to sanction a .ENG domain. "For many years the UK's online entity has been represented by the .CO.UK domain extension," claims the petition's website. "The Welsh and the Scots have been campaigning for their own country-specific domains .CYM and .SCO respectively, despite not being classed as independent countries. We believe that we - the English - should also be allowed our own independent voice on the internet and show our patriotism through our choice of domain name."
The petition is still young as it was launched on April 23rd of this year. Its creators hope to gather around 10,000 signatures before taking it to ICANN and, in their own words, "lobby ICANN to make .ENG available."
Seasoned ICANN watchers will no doubt consider this plan a little flawed. New TLDs such as .ENG can of course be okayed by ICANN, but only if they are part of the Internet overseer's official new TLD request for proposals (RFP). This means putting together a complete business plan, like .BERLIN or .PARIS are doing, so that the new TLD project can be submitted to ICANN when the RFP process begins (the next one is currently expected early in 2009). Doing so requires deep pockets and, if you're claiming to represent a nation such as England, clear support from national authorities or government.
In other words, although a nice try, it's very doubtful that a web petition would suffice, even if it does draw a large amount of signatures.
P.S.: Here are the links to the Welsh's and the Scot's attempt to get their own domains.
.ARABIA, .RUSSIAN… a new run of TLDs?
Wednesday, April 9. 2008
There's a lot of talk about the possible types of new TLDs that could be made available on the Internet in the near future.
Just days ago, stories coming out of Dubai, where ICANN has just held one of its outreach meetings, mentioned a possible .ARAB or .ARABIA for the region.
I've also been hearing of possible "linguistic" TLDs like .RUSSIAN, .CHINESE or .GREEK. The idea remains one of pushing for a more regional Internet, where local flavours are brought to the fore. And it's also a great way of pushing for IDN use, as obviously if we're talking regional or linguistic TLDs, they would need to be useable in the areas or languages they represent. In short, a perfect solution for killing two birds with one stone, both IDNs and the launch of new TLDs being hot topics at ICANN right now.
But the "fad" of the moment remains the "City TLDs" or "cTLDs" for short. Projects such as .BERLIN and .PARIS are known to be underway and would obviously be the first on the table should ICANN start a new official round of request for new TLD proposals.
When might that be? By latest estimates, not before the start of 2009…
Whoa, hold your horses there, Dot ME!
Tuesday, April 1. 2008
Francesco paints a humorous picture of .ME's launch programme, which we revealed at the end of March in the French edition of Domaines.Info.
His message to the Montenegrin powers-that-be: don't rush things and make sure you get the launch right. Sound advice. Even if the local registry's angst to open for business is understandable, mistakes made at the launch of a new extensions are generally then carried over for years before they can be fixed.
So let's hope the people at .ME do resist the temptation to rush things, because there's a domain with plenty of potential if I ever saw one (just think of all those possibilities with a "me" on the end...).
For those of you who don't understand French, here's the current launch schedule published in the March 27th edition of Domaines.Info.
From March 25 to April 16, a priority period will enable prior registrants of .YU domains (.ME is being migrated from the ex-Yugoslav suffix) to request the equivalent .ME name.
From May 1 to May 6, .ME's sunrise period will be restricted to Montenegrin nationals.
From June 6 to June 26, the registry has announced a landrush period, the precise rules of which are apparently not yet finalised. This, in part, is what prompted Francesco's warning to the registry to take its time and do a proper launch.
Go-live is planned from July 17th.
