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The draft New gTLD Applicant Guidebook (version 2) has been released along with an analysis of the comments to the prior version. The documents are voluminous. I glanced at the revised draft Base Agreement, and it's clearly unacceptable as there continue to be no price caps in place to protect domain name registrants... more
For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought my days spent dreaming of hover-boards, flying cars and Biff's elusive Sports Almanac were finally over. From reports circulating online, we had finally reached "Back to the Future Day". Those movie buffs out there will know exactly what I'm referring to... But it got me thinking. What would the Domain Name world look like if that crazy cat Doc Brown swung past in his DeLorean, with a fully-charged flux capacitor and a return ticket to October 21st 2015? more
Since Verisign published its second SSR report a few weeks back, recently updated with revision 1.1, we've been taking a deeper look at queries to the root servers that elicit "Name Error," or NXDomain responses and figured we'd share some preliminary results. Not surprisingly, promptly after publication of the Interisle Consulting Group's Name Collision in the DNS [PDF] report, a small number of the many who are impacted are aiming to discredit the report. more
This essay discusses recent findings on the difficulty of overcoming decision bias, and it argues that this factor, when combined with a diverse and fragmented demand for new gTLDs, makes a focused marketing strategy crucial to the success of the program. In addition, success requires cooperation among registries and resellers when it comes to sales and marketing. Impulse buying aside, a product's sales are driven by the product's utility... more
In the second part of this two-part series article (part one here), Andrew McLaughlin concludes his critical look at the recently reported study, Public Participation in ICANN, by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School... "ICANN has never attempted to be -- and was never designed to be -- 'representative' of the worldwide Internet community in any mathematically precise way. In view of the vast size of the global population of Internet users, and the specialized technical focus of ICANN's policy-making responsibilities, it would be a hopeless task to try to achieve truly representative statistical proportionality among ICANN's participants, committees, task forces, or Board members. Rather, here's how the U.S. government's foundational 1998 DNS policy statement described the core principle of 'representation'." more
Verisign recently published a technical report on new generic top-level domain (gTLD) security and stability considerations. The initial objective of the report was to assess for Verisign's senior management our own operational preparedness for new gTLDs, as both a Registry Service Provider for approximately 200 strings, as well as a direct applicant for 14 new gTLDs... However, in cataloging internal and external risks related to the new gTLD program, we found several far-reaching and long-standing issues that need to be further explored and/or resolved with varying levels of urgency. more
Words (and by extension their constituent letters) are as free to utter and use as is the air sustaining life. No one owns them. There is no toll fee to be paid to dictionary makers who curate them. There are, however, two carve-outs from this public domain, namely words and letters businesses use as designations of origin for their marketplace presence, protected by trademark law; and words and letters arranged expressively by authors, protected by copyright law. more
The essay examines some of the new domain name managers' unjustifiable obsession with owning monopoly gTLDs when they should devote more energy and thought to making domain names more value adding. For the last three decades, the discourse regarding competitive advantage has focused on the need to rely on rare/unique resources and capabilities. However, more recently, the focus has shifted to the imperatives of efficient utilization of nonunique resources... more
Some readers may wonder why I chose to raise the issue of "trust" now or even ask what it will take for ICANN to repair it. After all, the New gTLDs have been launched; applications have started being received, and all ICANN official announcements are that all is good and going according to plan. But many other readers and astute observers of this space, domestic and international, would not confuse the public dead silence we are hearing from ICANN and its insider community or the euphoria of the long awaited application submissions we are seeing to mean that all is perfect. more
In preparation for Monday's Joint Applicant Support (JAS) Working Group call, I spent some time reviewing various documents in connection with what are ICANN's actual costs in reviewing top-level domain name applications. One thing that caught my attention was the following metric in Rod Beckstrom's most recent CEO Monthly One Page Metric Report. more
The new Top-Level Domain (TLD) program was designed from the outset to enhance competition and foster innovation. It was a great result for the wider industry to see approximately one-third of the applications received by ICANN submitted by some of the world's largest companies seeking to own and operate their own .brand TLD. Even with organisations such as Apple, Citibank and IBM applying for their respective TLDs, scepticism remained on the potential for .brands to succeed. more
In my role as CMO of .CLUB I get to speak about domain names at different events all over the world, and have been doing so for more than two years now. From stages and podiums at countless events I have heard the same comments and questions again and again, and in all that time it seems that very little has changed when it comes to the perceptions of the new domain extensions, the so-called "new gTLDs"... more
As we blogged about recently, Neustar is committed to ensuring that the domain name system is secure and stable and has been operating top-level domains (TLDs) for over a decade. Tuesday, Neustar submitted comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in response to ICANN's proposal to delay the launch of hundreds of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN's decision to delay the launch is based on a study it commissioned that measured the potential frequency of domain-name collision. more
With the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) expected to begin accepting submissions within the next month or so, many companies are now attempting to identify marks for inclusion. As a reminder, the TMCH is a centralized repository of validated rights which will be used in support of ICANN's New gTLD Program. Submissions to the TMCH enable brand owners to register their trademarks as domain names during so-called Sunrise Periods. more
I read with interest the recent blog written by Theresa Swinehart a Sr. Advisor to the President on Strategy. She wrote: "The most critical element of this [ICANN Transition] process is trust and alignment. To ensure success on this accountability track, we must as a community work closely together to make sure that the final process is meaningful. There is plenty of work to be done in an ambitious period of time." more
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