Domain Names

More Than Just Forwarding: How .brands Like Apple Can Use Defensive Registrations

The domain industry media was abuzz last week with speculation that tech giant Apple may be gearing up to launch its .apple brand TLD. Rumours began when it was discovered that Apple registered 29 .com domain names that to the untrained eye, appear to be strangely worded. These include the likes of imovieapple.com, macbookproapple.com and ipadapple.com, providing hope to many industry pundits that they could potentially be defensive registrations designed to protect Apple from losing traffic when it begins to utilise its .apple TLD.

Global Domain Registrations Edge Closer to 300M: Verisign

The number of domain names registered around the world grew by 2.2 million, or 0.8 percent, to 296 million at the end of June according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign. With similar growth, the 300 million mark should be reached around the end of 2015. Worldwide registrations have grown by 16.4 million, or 5.9 percent, year over year.

One Step Closer to an Accountable ICANN

We believe that certain updates in the latest draft that limit the scope of ICANN's Mission, as specified in paragraph 188, could explicitly prevent ICANN from actively enforcing its contracts with Registries and Registrars or use contracts as a tool to implement consensus policies in the future. We suggest in our comments that revised bylaw text be added explicitly stating that the enforcement and creation of ICANN's contracts with Registries and Registrars...

Challenges for .brands - Launching Your .brand

One of the consistent themes of this blog series is that despite similarities across .brand TLDs, no two brands will settle on the exact same strategy and process for moving their TLD to launch. As I discussed last week, an implementation plan ensures that each required action is documented, responsibility for it is assigned and a more detailed project plan can be developed to take this process further.

Challenges for .brands - From Strategy to Implementation Planning

While your strategy and objectives speak more broadly to why you're launching a .brand TLD, your implementation plan covers the all-important 'how'. Once you complete your strategy workshop session to agree upon objectives and approach, how do you actually launch a .brand TLD? You need an implementation plan to guide you from strategy to launch, and beyond. At its core, the implementation plan is a checklist; just like a pilot landing a plane, you need to run through your checklist to ensure you don't miss any crucial elements.

Costly Domain Name Price Comparison Sites

Price comparison sites, including those for domain registrations, are supposed to benefit buyers. Do they? Recent theory and practice suggest a friend-and-foe relationship. Comparison sites introduce an entire layer of costs, notably including the sites' marketing costs.

Have New Domains Had Our Twerking Moment?

There's a lot of .buzz about Google's new holding company, Alphabet. From .NYC to .London to .Tokyo the "new Google" story is making .news everywhere, as the .media large and small speculates on what it means for the .online and .tech industries, and beyond. After all, as one of the .top brands and companies in the .world, when Google makes a move it can have .global impact.

The IANA Stewardship Transition - Now Is the Time to Share Your Views

The IANA Stewardship Transition process may have started more than a year ago, but last week it reached its pinnacle with the publication of the compiled Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions from the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the Global Multistakeholder Community" by the IANA Coordination Group (ICG).

ICANN Wins a Very Weak TLD Lawsuit

Back in the 1990s as the Internet was starting to become visible to the world, several people had the bright idea of setting up their own top level domains and selling names in competition with what was then the monopoly registrar Network Solutions (NSI). For these new TLDs to be usable, either the TLD operators had to persuade people to use their root servers rather than the IANA servers, or else get their TLDs into the IANA root. Attempts to get people to use other roots never were very successful...

Dot SUCKS: The Ultimate Vanity Domain

When last we wrote, trademark lawyers had written an outraged letter to ICANN about the $2500 price to preregister trademark.sucks names, and ICANN, reliably panicking in the face of legal threats, wrote to the US Federal Trade Commission and Canadian Office of Consumer Affairs saying please tell us that's illegal so we can shut down this registry with whom we just signed a long-term contract. (The mysterious $1 surcharge turned out to be a weak attempt by ICANN to collect debts that affiliates of registry owner Momentous defaulted on long ago.)