This was discussed at DomainState too. I imagine .om and .co will be next.

When thinking of new gTLDs, I want first dibs on .coom, .cmo and .como. :)

I poked around the .cm TLD and found some interesting stuff which I wrote up in this blog entry.

did anyone try mtv.mtv.com ? or something like in that area ?

Alex, since the top level {*.cm} has been wildcarded, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ... etc levels will all provide results that make it look as if the domain typed in actually exists.  http://mtv.mtv.cm works.

My attempts to connect to the SMTP and POP3 ports for a made-up domain

You could say the only “trademark” that is being typo-squatted here is “.com”.  And since no one has a trademark on “.com”, there is no UDRP dispute or trademark suit possible here.

These are not “registrations”, so specific trademarks are not being singled out for treatment.  Every string is being treated equally, whether or not it is recognizable in a written language somewhere as a trademark.

I also do not see any “stability” issues here that would lead to systems breaking down because of the wildcard behavior.

I can see how clumsy fingers could cause a lot of traffic to hit the .cm servers.  They didn’t ask for it.  But it is up to them to decide how to handle it.  right?

There are some who would call this a public service.

One suggestion: they could eliminate possible confusion by announcing themselves:  “Welcome to the .cm top-level domain.  We notice that you might be challenged in your typing! “. 

Tom Barrett
EnCirca, Inc

With respect to Ram’s comment, it’s just an A record that points to a web server, so any other attempted connection with fail. They published SPF -all records to discourage people from sending or receiving mail, for whatever good that will do.

The trademark issue is more serious, since it is quite clear that the Canadian web site the wildcard points to is deliberately benefiting from typos.  If I were the owner of a .com web site with a famous mark such as amazon.com or espn.com, I would not be amused.

Tom, I’ve seen plenty of trademark suits for names that are trademarked ending with a “.com”...

I looked up the A record for google.cm to see if it had been cached in major ISPs around the world - an empirical test of the popularity of the .cm wildcard.  Doesn’t seem all that popular as yet, but it’s early days still:

Germany: [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Ireland: [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Israel:  [No cached answer: Would go to NS of cm.]
Italy:  [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
UK: BT Broadband & BT Yahoo A=72.51.27.58 [TTL=10m 29s]
UK: Easynet Ltd. [No cached answer: Would go to NS of cm.]
US: ATT Worldnet [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
US: Mindspring #2 A=72.51.27.58 [TTL=12m 34s]
US: UUNet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of cm.]

Courtesy dnsstuff.com

Google.cm is a top 100,000 Alexa site (which likely means 5,000+ visitors/day).

Extrapolate that to all domains, and I would not be surprised if that traffic is worth at least $3 million/yr.

Ram,

You might check the TTL on existing .cm registrations (of which google.cm is a rare exception).

As George points out, other metrics suggest monster traffic:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Searches done in June 2006
Count Search Term
27189 myspace.cm

By way of comparison, a popular domain like taliban.com received, yesterday, 78 visitors.  If use as a search term is any indication of accidentaly typing into the search bar, instead of the address bar, then myspace.cm alone must be generating a great deal of traffic.

(And, yes, I realize that there are people who believe it would be more “socially useful” if the Taliban had taliban.com, rather than someone who is simply “squatting” on the name.  Unlike those anti-squatters, I cannot see the usefulness of supporting terrorism.  Perhaps someone can explain it to me.)

These are not “registrations”, so specific trademarks are not being singled out for treatment.  Every string is being treated equally, whether or not it is recognizable in a written language somewhere as a trademark.

But, Tom, that is also true of domains registered by the “domain tasters”.  They are not singling out trademarks either, but are auto-registering based on various search feeds they receive - and those strings are treated equally, whether or not they are recognizable somewhere as trademarks.

Lack of intent is indeed one of the points on which the cybersquatting claim against Dotster hinges.  I guarantee you that if you are testing 200K domains a week, you are testing more non-trademark relevant strings than trademark-relevant strings.

So I punched in a few comparables against some of the world’s most popular .com domains.  The growth in traffic (per Alexa) is noticeable.

Site     3 mos. Change
————-!———————
Yahoo.cm—-  162,464 up 96,079
MSN.cm   —- 1,306,656 up 702,853
Google.cm—-  97,576 up 9,582
Baidu.cm —- 508,062 up 418,506
ebay.cm —-2,148,031 up 908,224
cnn.cm   —-1,266,192 up 743,540
youtube.cm—- 1,030,527

-Ram

John, I am not sure you can write “Cameroon has now

wild-carded its ccTLD.”
Their policy has always been open, and did not change for a long time. I remember I was contemplating whether I should register a .cm domain name (CM are my initials…) in the beginning of this century, and the registration rules were the same as today.

It’s not germane to this disucssion whether anyone can get a .CM name; what has changed is that even if you don’t have one, or if none has been registered, it will still resolve on the web.

Try cedric.cm, a website that works automagically!

My wrong! I thought “wild-carded” in this context meant “opened”. My apologies!

I think that the BIND root-delegation-only option was added specifically to deal with the Verisign .com issue, but it nicely handles this one as well.
http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/delegation-only.html contains a suggested list of exceptions, and .cm is not on that list. Anyone running BIND that was bothered enough about the Verisign issue would have installed this long ago.

I poked around looking for more TLD wildcards, and found
quite a few of them.

Appolinaire NOUMBI: Chairman Cameroon Federation of engineers Association
We are not sure that

Please, give us some few days for necessary inquiries. Thanks, cameroon is a proud country and don’t want its name involved in bad actions. We believe that even if there are some bad guys in our country as in each other country all over the world. There are also some cameroonians who are honest and are working hard on daily basis as members of differents civil society organisation, to built a strong country where life will be better for all, cameroonians or not.
As Chairman of the Cameroon Federation of engineers Association, member of circleid.

Please, even before receiving informations from the government of my country on this subject, every body who can help us to restore the image of our country should contact me and give me advice on what can be done. Their names, if they want, will be given to the government of my country. they will have an opportunity to join a think thank : (Information technology For Better Cameroon IT-BETTER-CAMMEROON) ,  that we have created as a section of aour federation of cameroon engineers association. This is our email contact:  .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . our phone number (237) 760 20 77 or (237) 991 76 24. this is my personal website www.noumbi.org if you want to see my photo.

Each of you must help me to change what is wrong.

Mr. Noumbi,

“Wrong” can be a very subjective term.  It is not clear that anyone is doing anything “wrong” here.

There are some people who believe that the practice of providing a “parking page” for unused domain names is wrong.

There are other people who believe that providing something in response to an unused name is better than nothing.  Indeed, there is browser software which does this, and there are recursive DNS providers (e.g. OpenDNS), which do this.

There are still other people who believe that providing a search function in response to a URL which contains a trade or service mark valid anywhere in the world, should not be done at any place in the world.

There are also legal, technical, and moral definitions of “wrong”.  I personally do not believe that what is happening in .com is legally or morally wrong.  I defer to those with deeper understanding of the relevant RFC’s to determine whether what is happening is “wrong” in some technical sense.

As far as the image of Cameroon is concerned, I am sure there is no one who seriously would argue that Cameroon should not exploit its various assets to maximum economic advantage, and there are probably many who envy or admire this development.

If anything, it certainly has attracted attention to the .cm top-level domain, and there is a saying that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

Typo correction: I meant “what is happening in .cm”, not “what is happening in .com”.

Of all of the embarassing mistakes to make in this context…

Thanks! a lot John for your information.
I’m french speaking cameroonian. Cameroon like canada is bilingual country (french and english). i do hope my english level is not so bad.

I want you or another person to help me understand better a problem.  A state owned company camtel. see http://www.camtel.cm is in charge of the domain name .cm

Are you saying that camtel has given the responsability to another company in the world.

to use .cm extention, so that when i type http://www.noumbi.cm or www.google.cm, i see a commercial page as i’m seeing now?

Even if it is the case!  The Federation of cameroon engineers association, (i’m the chairman), member of cameroon civil society network, iis not satisfied, and here are our arguments against the .cm deal.
———————————————————————
after http://www.noumbi.cm or www.google.cm,
and after faq link at the botton of the page, this what i can read.
—————-
What is this service?

Acting pursuant to the authority of the sovereign Republic of Cameroon, this service uses Unregistered Cameroon domain names (Unregistered domain names that end in “.CM”) for the purpose of facilitating information and advertising. Anyone who attempts to access an Unregistered Cameroon domain name will be directed to this service.
————————-
1-Cameroon does not have a direct benefice. There is no specific link selling cameroon image.
2- There is no direct link to camtel, the company responsible of the .cm extension management.
3- I don’t see the adress of the company. Can some one tell me the company responsible of this utilisation. I want to contact them directly, so that they can give us the name of “the authority of the sovereign Republic of Cameroon,” they are talking about.
4- the extension .cm has only 188 website . We are struggling since 2 years to help poors company, organisation in cameroon to register their domain name and even give them free website so that they can be present on internet
5- Tomorrow, we will try to contact Camtel administrator to learn more.
6- We want as an ngo, to receive 2% of the money coming from this .cm topic worldwide to help small size companies in cameroon to have their domain name.

8- internet for many cameroonian, means a systhem for young black cameroonian girls to look for white husband using i love you via the web websites.  many young girls don’t work any more. they don’t go to school for the same reason. every day, you see some of them, Hidden behind bad quality curtains, “fighting in from of few webcam in cybercafé, to send “bad” pictures to their lovers abroad” in order to receive few us$ dollars via western union instant money transfert union to receive few dollars. Some of theses girls, have more than 90 net-lovers worldwide. Some have the opportunity to find husband abroad, using tgis technique. But they are very feww.  Even married women are seen in cybercafés at one am in the morning, while the cameroonian husband is sleeping taking care of the children, while madam is doing business in cybercafés, with webcams.
As the result of this situation.  For a population of 15.000.000 cameroonian, more than 14.800.000 , think that internet is not a good think.
We , cameroonian engineers want this situation to change. Internet can be use to give
free education to all, help them how to do télé-work, télé-translation etc…
If you where cameroonian engineer, will you be happy of the situation. this is why you should help us. Please. Even a gift of 1 us dollars can help.
————————————-
Any how, some thing should be done, and i need the help of everybody.
For example.
1-we want to launch a hudge programm in cameroon.
[15.000.000websitesfor each of you] with .cm, or .Com or .org
extension for small size companies in cameroon.  If some body can help, we will appreciate.
Thanks a lot to you all.
2- Another project is [one children, one our in front of a connected to internet computer, at least one our per year] , in cities or rural areas.
With this second project, we want to drive out the Cameronian girls and the Cameronian old women who give up husband and children, who monopolize the few rare computers of the some rare cybercafés available for bad reasons, in order to give the place to the young schoolboys, orphans or children having poor relations who will be able then under our supervision, to use the worldwide Web to discover the good side of Internet, which educates, which makes it possible to discover the world with few expenses. 
i’m sending this post from yaoundé. it is now 23.24 gmt.
i believe , internet can help the world to be a better place for every body.
In conclusion to my post.
[We, believe that, .cm extension should help develop internet in cameroon, instead of being used as now, to redirect people to comercials website else where, and not in cameroon.]