Hybrid Domainer

An eventful week and a time for domainers to analyze their portfolio

By: RH

It was an eventful week with the "big reveal" by ICANN. Applications for a .mango, a .apple and a .orange. I am surprised there was no .banana,(although there was one for bananarepublic) because it certainly was bananas this week in the domain industry.

People are already getting hyped up about the situation. People on both sides with no shades of grey.

• Dot Com is king
• All these tlds will do is leak traffic to the .com
• This will screw up email and vital emails will get lost

Then the other side has their rhetoric

• Yay .com squatters will no longer make millions
• .Com is no longer king
• The public will have no problem understanding these because they are intuitive

You can see the seeds of this in a thread on Namepros.com http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/760524-death-change-in-domains.html

The title alone tells you things are already heating up. I actually believe domain forums will see a pick up in traffic as many come to give their opinion and go at it with their ideological opposites.

The old .mobi threads were legendary and now we should see that times 1000.

There will be no new extensions for at least nine months and most probably longer than that. For domainers .homedepot or .apple does not really matter, they are extensions that are not for domainers in the first place.

It will be the generic extensions like .shop,.web,.site that domainers will care about. These extensions depending on who wins the extension, will probably be open to all registrants. These are extensions that may see interest from those end users who cannot or will not pay .com prices.

So now domainers have some lead time to prune their third tier names, names that are not the big one word, category defining names, the super short, easy to spell brandable. The names to be looking at selling before the new extensions come will be long tail domains with little search volume. The hard to spell only you think they sound good, etc... If the new tlds catch on a lot of these names lose the most value and even if the new tlds don't go crazy, they will still be an attractive alternative to a so so .com.

There is no need to panic but rather take a hard look at your portfolio and maybe look to sell some of these names now rather than later.

This is not a zero sum game, .com and your favorite cc tld can do well and some new extensions can do ok too.  If .web does 500,000 registration in the first year, the Castello Brothers will still be kicking butt on PalmSprings.com, people will still want to buy LLL.com domains and people will still argue the merits of .mobi.

New York Times: Ethics fight over domain names intensifies

By: RH

The New York Times ran a piece about the continuing frustration some have with ICANN.

From the article:

PARIS — A boardroom dispute over ethics has broken out at the organization that maintains the Internet address system after its most important supporter, the United States government, reproached the group for governance standards said to fall short of “requirements requested by the global community.”

The Commerce Department said this month that while it was temporarily extending a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to manage the allocation of computers’ Internet protocol addresses — and the .com and .net names of Web sites associated with them — it warned the organization that it needed to tighten its rules against conflicts of interest or risk losing a central role.

Read the whole article here

Senator questions the ethics of ICANN

Wyden raises internet bias question on domain names

September 22, 2011

Wyden Calls for Ethics Rules to Prevent Revolving Door for Internet Domain Name Regulators
By Senator Ron Wyden, Press Release 

Washington, D.C. – As the online community prepares for a massive expansion in potential domain names and the expiration of the contract with the non-profit, non-governmental organization responsible for domain name regulation, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) raised concerns about the potential for bias and unfair favoritism stemming from a revolving door between internet regulators and the multi-million dollar domain name industry they formerly regulated.

In a letter to Acting Commerce Department Secretary Rebecca Blank and Assistant Secretary Lawrence Strickling – the administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) – that is responsible for overseeing internet regulators. Wyden highlighted the need for ethics and transparency rules — similar to that of Federal officials — to be included in any contract with future domain name authorities known as an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers Authority (ICANN) is set to expire on September 30.

“As you know, any designated IANA is hugely important in regulating the multi-million dollar domain name industry,” Wyden said in the letter. “At the same time, because the IANA is not a branch of the federal government, its executive leadership is not subject to the same financial disclosure, ethics, or conflict of interest rules as executive leadership at federal agencies or in Congress.”

“While I support the control of this system by NTIA, I also believe that any IANA employees ought to be made subject to the same ethics rules in place as NTIA employees. With the growth in importance of this authority, it is important to ensure that decisions are made impartially,” Wyden continued in the letter.

Over the last decade, the selling of internet domain names has grown into a multi-million dollar industry and is poised to grow significantly as an expansion of potential domain name suffixes (ex: .com and .org) is implemented. However, ICANN – the non-profit that regulates these sales – is not a government agency and is not subject to the same ethics rules as other federal agencies. As news reports have indicated, a formerly high-ranking official at ICANN has left the organization and was immediately hired by one of the domain name companies regulated by ICANN. Wyden has raised concerns about the revolving door between the organization and the industry and called for strict ethics guidelines highlighting transparency at any future domain name regulator be worked into the upcoming contract negotiation.