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Who's Next?
Fri, 07/30/2010 - 13:41 — Josh Bourne — PermalinkUNICEF appears to be in the market for its own TLD. The UN organization dedicated to providing humanitarian and development aid to children and mothers in developing countries recently announced a Request for Information from potential vendors to help acquire and operate .UNICEF.
Back in October 2009, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) entered into an agreement with ICANN to operate .POST, making UNICEF the second UN organization to pursue its own TLD. I’m curious to see what will happen going forward – will even more UN organizations follow suit and apply for eponymous TLDs? Moreover, I wonder why the UN is so interested in owning TLDs and why these organizations feel they need these kinds of labels when they have .INT all to themselves and there is no fee for registering an .INT domain.
I’m also wondering who will be next – maybe the World Health Organization with .WHO?
Priorities?
Thu, 06/24/2010 - 12:45 — Josh Bourne — PermalinkI just finished a conversation with a contact who is still at the ICANN meeting in Brussels. He attended the ICANN Public Forum and let me know that in his opinion it looks like the .XXX gTLD, an extension dedicated to hosting adult content, should be approved soon. Overall, he said, there was very little objection from the forum attendees. In fact, the discussion lasted only about 20 minutes. I can’t say I expected much more – many people who attend ICANN meetings and participate in the ICANN process are, generally speaking, either interested in selling more and more domain names (like registrars), or are totally oblivious to the ICANN community’s bias toward selling more names.
On the other hand, I heard the discussion over whether or not ICANN’s Chairman of the Board should earn a $75,000 salary lasted a full 45 minutes.
Pakistan and EU Parliament – More Updates from ICANN Brussels
Thu, 06/24/2010 - 06:52 — Josh Bourne — Permalink
George Kirikos wasn’t the only one who raised really interesting and challenging points at the ICANN meeting. There are two more people who made comments and asked questions that I think are important and that I’d like to talk about here.
The first is Zahid Jamil, who hails form Karachi, Pakistan. The port city in the past has reclaimed land from the sea, and the idea of a mass reclamation project was proposed not long ago. While the initiative had many potential benefits (increasing the amount of land would lower housing prices for citizens and generate revenue for the government), it was widely agreed that the economic impact of such a project needed to be assessed. Eventually, the geological and environmental analysts determined that there was not enough information and hard data to thoroughly measure the environmental impact of the project.
Zahid compared this process to ICANN’s new gTLD rollout, pointing out how ICANN is pressing forward “without enough hard statistics, feasibility studies, and analysis, etc.” He went on to say, “Here I would caution against a wholesale launch of new gTLDs in the context, similarly, of the root scaling study and economic studies, and the cautions that have come out in the recommendations, such as recommendations for surveys, etc., and the fragility and the risks to the Internet we heard all about at Nairobi.”
Another great contribution came from Bertrand de la Chapelle, the Representative from France to ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC). Betrand made a spot-on analogy that compared the Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) to the process of drafting a parliamentary law. When drafting a new law, a huge amount of preparatory work is involved that results in, as Bertrand quaintly put it, a pile of documents “as high as the Eiffel Tower.” The resulting law, however, must be understandable and concise. In this case, the DAG is equal to the preparatory work – long, dense and unrefined. Bertrand went on to suggest that the DAG, along with all the comments and work that have gone into it, should be reworked into a much shorter and more user-friendly document of around 20 pages or so.
Both Zahid and Bertrand’s comments get at a common sentiment that I’ve been hearing, both at the meeting and in other conversations: that ICANN is nowhere near ready to launch new gTLDs. In fact, it has only really begun to do its homework on the matter. For example, aside from releasing multiple versions of the DAG, ICANN only just released an analysis of the economic impact of new gTLDs last week. That kind of study should have been conducted years ago, when new gTLDs were first being discussed.
Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), ICANN doesn’t seem to want to hear from anyone warning them to slow down. In response to Zahid’s comments, Kurt Pritz, the moderator of the New gTLD Update session, basically said that ICANN was moving forward with new gTLDs because that has been the direction of ICANN’s policy – without any greater justification.
DAGger?
Tue, 06/22/2010 - 14:57 — Josh Bourne — Permalink
While in Brussels, I had the chance to participate first-hand in one of ICANN’s international meetings. One of the sessions I attended yesterday was the “New gTLD Program Update.” George Kirikos, who many in the ICANN community know and appreciate for his knowledge and commitment to improving ICANN, submitted a question via remote participation about an important paper Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 2004 about the detrimental costs of new gTLDs (at the time, .MOBI and .XXX were among the group of proposed extensions). Berners-Lee is an engineer and computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web (the system that links hyertext documents over the Internet, not the whole Internet itself – Al Gore would be very offended if I didn’t make that distinction). The paper is very insightful, and especially applicable today, as ICANN is on the verge of opening up the domain name system (DNS) to an unlimited amount of new gTLDs. The paper is not very long and completely worth reading, but one of the most salient points I took out of it is the following:
“Our first instincts, then should be not to change the system with anything but incremental and carefully thought-out changes. The addition of new top-levels domains is a very disturbing influence. It carries great cost. It should only be undertaken when there is a very clear benefit to the new domain. In the case of the proposed .mobi domain, the change is actually detrimental.”
A big thanks goes out to George for showing me this paper, and also for pointing out how ICANN has ignored its existence. To my knowledge, George has not heard from anyone at ICANN after he sent a message about the Berners-Lee paper and linked it to the current environment. They also dodged his question during the session, so I wanted to shed light on this subject:
According to Kirikos, the DNS is a tree structure with a single root, and it was widely agreed that such a structure was an improvement over the previous “flat space” of host names. Infinite new gTLDs would be a movement backwards into that flat space. ICANN is basically on its way toward institutionalizing this backward movement, and in turn, cause widespread instability and harm.
In my view, ICANN’s proposal for how to roll out new gTLDs will create needless chaos and instability in the DNS. New gTLDs could potentially be interesting to brands and to the greater Internet community, but ICANN is not creating an attractive environment for businesses to invest in. Rather, brand owners will spend money in order to protect themselves from infringement, but that spending does not equate to an “investment” in new gTLDs. It is likely that many brand owners will view new gTLDs as a financial burden, instead of an economic opportunity.
Lessons from the Domain Name Aftermarket – TLDs beyond .COM
Tue, 06/15/2010 - 12:48 — Phil Lodico — PermalinkThe aftermarket is one of the resources we use to measure the value of domain names. We recently decided to look into how the reported sales prices have trended across domains that have changed hands more than once over the past few years. We found that roughly 30 total domain were sold more than once and were reported publicly. Of those, only one domain name contained a “new TLD” (i.e., a TLD was introduced after the original group that included .COM, .NET, etc.): games.mobi.
Overall, we found that almost every .COM domain name experienced an increase in sale price from one sale to the next. In contrast, games.mobi, originally purchased for $401,500 in 2007 according to Sedo.com, plummeted in value in the course of a year, selling for $44,000 in 2008, according to DN Journal. Its aftermarket value dropped by a full 89 percent. .MOBI domains first became available to the public in September 2006. At that time, games.mobi was included in a list of premium names that then-registry mTLD had set aside for “equitable allocation,” meaning that it required the original registrant submit a request for proposal to obtain it (as opposed to being available on a first-come, first-served basis like most domains following the trademark “Sunrise Period”). From the beginning, games.mobi was identified as a high-demand domain name, which makes its devaluation even more dramatic.
While it was only as complete as the public record of domain sales, this small study points out a few significant facts about the domain name space. First of all, it shows that the value of .COM domain names has steadily appreciated over time; this is particularly true of keyword, category-defining domains. It also shows that the public is not as concerned with the newer TLDs as it is with .COM, .NET, .ORG and others. The fact that only one appeared in our list suggests that these names are not being bought and sold at the rate other TLD domain names are. Generic domain names in TLDs like .MOBI get registered almost immediately by speculators, but seem to have very little worth in the aftermarket.
Once new gTLDs are released, there will inevitably be a land rush to register domain names in various extensions. But what will those domains be worth further down the road?
To the Naysayers
Tue, 04/20/2010 - 10:31 — Josh Bourne — PermalinkCADNA recently released a report that predicts how much new generic TLDs will cost brand owners once they are released. A lot of the attention paid to the subject of new TLDs has been focused on .BRAND TLDs and whether or not companies should register their own branded TLD. In my experience dealing with various businesses, there seems to be the impression that once a company decides it will not register its own .BRAND, it will be in the clear and new TLDs will not be much of an issue. The truth is, generic TLDs like .MUSIC, .ECO and .NYC will actually be a greater concern for businesses in terms of defending their brands against infringement and cybersquatting.
After ICANN released its predictions regarding how many generic TLD applications it will receive in the initial round, CADNA went to work calculating how much brand owners on average will need to spend to defensively register their brands and trademarks across these new generic TLDs. It found that the initial launch will cost brand owners about $500,000 each, and that the cost to businesses worldwide could exceed $746 million. The full explanation of these figures and calculations can be viewed on the CADNA Web site.
CADNA, which many know is a nonprofit that FairWinds helped to found, undertook the task of figuring out the cost of new generic TLDs in order to give brand owners an accurate picture of what impact the TLD launch will have on their brands and their bottom lines. CADNA put forward this research to help illustrate how absurd it is to allow such a radical shift in Web site naming to be a complete free-for-all. New TLDs are probably a good idea – some day. But, it is never a good idea to build on a shaky foundation. ICANN is broken and anticybersquatting laws are outdated. If it underwent necessary reforms to improve its policy development process and Internet governance function in order to make public interest a higher priority, then a rollout of new TLDs would look very different. There wouldn’t be a massive flood of extensions that would create an impossible challenge for trademark holders and law enforcement to protect consumers from the misuse of brand names.
Unfortunately, since releasing its calculations, CADNA has experienced some negative backlash. Interestingly the negative reactions came specifically from new TLD entrepreneurs blogging about the topic. All those who called CADNA’s projections bogus and charged the organization with fear mongering are the same people who have a vested financial interest in the success of new TLDs. Not one of those critics contacted CADNA to ask for comments or for a further explanation of the calculations and methodology. Instead, they simply wrote off the figures because the results were inconvenient for them and their business. What it boils down to is this: these critics are calling CADNA biased when they are clearly as far from neutral as they can be.
It's Not Easy Being Green
Thu, 08/13/2009 - 13:58 — Phil Lodico — PermalinkThe Daily Green’s Living Green blog ran a story over the weekend about the proposed .eco gTLD and the various groups who are vying for control over it. On one side are Al Gore, the Sierra Club and Dot Eco. On the other are the Canadian Environmental group Big Room (former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is tied indirectly to the organization), WWF International and Green Cross. Each group is planning to donate a portion of the registration fees it will receive as operator of the gTLD to green programs and causes. Brian Clark Howard, the author of the post, questions the need for .eco – and all other new gTLDs for that matter. He contends that a separate gTLD could marginalize the green movement by taking it out of the mainstream, both in terms of Internet addresses and the global conversation. He writes, “I don't see why green sites need their own identifier and separate domain, when we should be reaching as many people as possible.”
Howard raises an interesting issue in his post: the potential fragmentation of the Internet that an unlimited number of new gTLDs could cause. Until now, I’ve focused on the issue of Internet fragmentation from a purely practical perspective – that new gTLDs will alter the way consumers search for content on the Web and will likely make their experience less fluid and more complicated, at least during the initial adoption period. But there are also the potential social ramifications that gTLDs could have. Howard fears that having a separate identifier will remove the green movement from the mainstream. Right now there is dialogue in a common space; could new TLDs actually work to isolate people?
This post resonated with me more than other pieces I’ve read about new gTLDs because Howard is not a domain name expert, but an average Internet user. He mentions his appreciation for the order and organization of the current system of 21 gTLDs. Ultimately, it is people like Howard who are going to be most affected by the change to the Internet structure. One of the application requirements for new gTLDs is that they must provide a benefit to a particular community. Howard embodies the target audience for .eco, and he’s clearly not buying into it.
At this point, it seems inevitable that ICANN will move forward with the rollout of new gTLDs. This is not an entirely bad thing. But ICANN and future gTLD operators need to remember to listen to end users like Howard, because they are the ones who are most affected by the changes to the Internet.
