iEstates.com

As reported earlier by DomainGang, Rick Latona’s ccTLDs.com Forum has found a new owner and has relaunched after billions of spam messages have been removed.

DNN spoke to Xavier Buck Executive Director and CEO of the new owner – domain registration company EuroDNS: “Our company always stood for promoting ccTLDs and that we believe the forum suits our services we believe in“.

The company is looking for local country partners to manage individual sections/ccTLDs within the forum. Buck went on to say:

We want to open it up to the community and hope to get local players to contribute to the forum. These partners would be allowed to manage their own sections as it were their forum. Our goal with ccTLDs.com is not to make money with it but to to make sure a dedicated place exists that regroups knowledge and exchange for all cctlds.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (8)

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ICANN announced the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Yemen, اليمن (xn--mgb2ddes).

With this announcement, a total of 27 countries/territories requests have successfully passed through the String Evaluation. Of these, 17 countries/territories (represented by 27 IDN ccTLDs) are delegated in the DNS root zone; with the remainder either readying to apply, or actively applying for, delegation of the string.

ICANN is looking forward to enabling the availability of non-Latin country-code domains for countries that qualify. ICANN will continue to accept applications for new requests in the Fast Track process, as well as processing requests through the String Delegation function. Staff support is available to help all countries and territories interested in participating in the Fast Track Process. Please email idncctldrequests@icann.org for any inquiries for participation.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (1)

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At the meeting Nominet said they have already shut down more than 3,000 websites in cooperation with investigators.

While Nominet says that “most of the domain names suspended so far were accused of involvement in selling counterfeit goods”…. “authorities are lobbying against limits on the types of allegations they could make to trigger domain name suspension.”

“Law enforcement authorities indicated resistance to the creation of a fixed category of offenses since it could limit responses to newly developing e-crime.”

Of course in London like in the US civil liberty groups and other worry about law enforcement abusing  such powers and as an example the Telegraph tells the story of the Fitwatch, a website offering advice to student protesters which was removed from the web by Metropolitan  Police Central e-Crime Unit.

Here back in the states 80,000 sites were temporary seized as child porn domains.

Shortly after EURid the .eu top-level domain (TLD) registry, sent out a glowing press release marking the domain’s fifth birthday, TechCrunch blasted the extension and the press release in a post entitled  “3.4 Million .EU Domain Names Registered In Five Years I Call Dismal Failure”

In the Press release EURid said:

“Today we celebrate .eu’s public launch five years ago. Steady growth since then has reinforced .eu’s position as one of the world’s ten largest top-level domains,” said Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid. “This proves that .eu gives companies an effective means to present themselves online as open for business across Europe.”

“Five years on and going strong”

“EURid celebrated .eu’s fifth anniversary at the European Parliament in Strasbourg with a birthday cake cutting ceremony yesterday.”

TechCrunch appearently didn’t get a piece of the cake saying in its post today:

“Is it really an achievement worth crowing about? I beg to differ.”

“Let’s look at the raw numbers, shall we?”

“Less than 3.4 million .eu domain names have been registered to date. To put that in perspective, half of those (that would be 1.7 million) were registered in April 2006, the first month of availability. That means it effectively took five years for the number of domain names that were secured within the first month of availability to double. Five. Years.”

“How many companies do you know that actively advertise their .eu domain name rather than the .com or the local country domain? How many times have you thought of a good domain name and immediately thought to yourself: I need to get the .eu domain name, pronto.”

You can read the rest of the TechCrunch Story here.

The general availability of the .So extension opened yesterday April 1st 2011.

Yes on April’s Fools Day.

No joke.

I guess its poetic justice that the ccTLD for arguably the most rouge nation on earth didn’t even know any better than to open up its extension on April’s Fools Day

I didn’t write about it yesterday because I knew everyone would think it was a April’s Fools Day Joke.

But the extension, which is the country code for the Republic Somalia, did in fact go live for General Registrations yesterday.

According to one domainer who participated in the Land Rush for the .So registry said they got the domains, books.so for $51 and Pirates.So for $10.

The fact that the registry even made the domain name Pirates.so available is quite a sad statement as to how little the registry knows about domain names and the domain business.

How many .So domains did we register?

Zero

Zip

None

.So there should be plenty of good domains left.

Here are some of the details:

“The policy for the TLD .SO is liberal, there are no restrictions concerning the registrants, no local presence service is needed. The registration period for domains registered during General Availability has to be at least one year and maximum ten years. .SO domain names must be made up of a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 63 characters (excluding the extension). Only the Latin alphabet letters a-z, digits, and hyphens will be accepted.”

“Domain names beginning or ending with hyphens, as well as domain names with hyphens on the third and fourth position are prohibited. Technical operator of .SO is the Japanese company GMO Registry, for the operative tasks the Somali SO registry is responsible. The “sponsoring organization” of the TLD is the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications of Somalia.”

As the CEO of Key Systems Alexander Siffrin proclaimed yesterday:

“Many memorable .SO domain names are still available”

That maybe the understatement of the year.

DomainMonster.com is charging $24.99 per year for a .So registration.

Name.com is charging $23.99 for a .So registration.

As an extra added bonus it does not seem that the registry whois is working properly.

 

 

 

Despite a war raging in Libya,  home to the .LY domain extension (ccTLD) and a very uncertain future as to the Government of the country, someone has stepped up and paid 10,000 euro’s approximately $14,000 for the domain name 3.ly.

You have to admit with Libya  in turmoil, and with the Government cutting off Internet service inside the country you have to be somewhat brave to spend $14K on a .Ly domain.

Of course months ago Syria also warned that such short domain names might be taken by the state at some future date.

If you feel like you missed the boat on 3.ly don’t worry,  the auction for d.ly is still going on Sedo and with over 14 hours to go bidding is just at $1,750.

auDA, the Australian Domain Name Administrator, announced today that the registry had passed the 2 million registration mark last night.

“The .au domain has the highest penetration rate in the world for regulated namespaces with restricted eligibility when you take into account our population. The .au domain has become part of the fabric of doing business in Australia. We have seen continual strong growth in the namespace despite the global financial crisis and other market factors. .au is Australia’s domain namespace of choice and the only place to show that you are a trusted Australian,” Mr Kinderis, AusRegistry’s CEO, said.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (4)

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Two of the largest newspapers in the country have Front Page stories about domain names and its all about new gTLD and new ccTLD’s like .Co and .Me

Yes I know a LOT of you are getting tired of stories about new gTLD’s and .Co but this is what the mainstream press is covering and covering hard, so on to the stories

The New York Times article entitled “For Countries That Own Shorter Web Site Suffixes, Extra Cash From Abroad” talks about some of the new ccTLD’s.that always seem to be in the news, Yes .Co, and .Me.

Interesting the The article sites Facebooks recent acquisition of FB.Me but not of FB.com.

“Logging on to Facebook? You can use the social networking site’s full Web address, or you can type www.fb.me.”

The most interesting part of the story for me is about the financial relationship between the .Co registry and the Colombian government.

I know there has been a lot of interest in what the government gets out of all these .Co registrations and now we know as the article quoted Juan Calle CEO of the .Co registry:

“Colombia, for example, gets 25% of the revenue from sales of the “.co” name under its deal with .CO Internet.”

We also now know how much money is being generated by the .Co registry and its impressive:

“Last year, the company generated a total of $20 million from the sale of “.co” domains; this year, that is expected to rise to more than $30 million, Mr. Calle said.”

Finally there has been a lot of conjuncture of how many .Co registrations there will be over the next few years and today Mr. Calle made a bold prediction:

“The company predicts that the total number of “.co” registrations will rise to five million within five years.”

5 Million in 5 Years?

Strong.

The Washington Post Story story entitled; “Rush is on for custom domain name suffixes”

Talked about the new gTLD program saying:

The trusty .com domain,  is about to face vast new competition that will dramatically transform the Web as we know it. New Web sites, with more subject-specific, sometimes controversial suffixes, will soon populate the online galaxy, such as .eco, .love, .god, .sport, .gay or .kurd.”

“This massive expansion to the Internet’s domain name system will either make the Web more intuitive or create more cluttered, maddening experiences. No one knows yet. But with an infinite number of naming possibilities, an industry of Web wildcatters is racing to grab these potentially lucrative territories with addresses that are bound to provoke.”

The article raises some points that we have talked about before like who gets an extension like .amazon the Internet company or the country of Brazil?

What happens when several groups apply for religious extensions like .Jewish or  .islam who is entitled to those

Other possible new extensions the article mentions are .sport, .lawyers.gay, aids., .hotels, .music  .paris and .nyc

The article goes on talk about the “first “.nxt” conference in San Fransisco this week in which “hundreds of investors, consultants and entrepreneurs are expected tfor the first “.nxt” conference, a three-day affair featuring seminars on ICANN’s complicated application guidelines.”

I will not only be at that show but speaking as well.

(Speaking of that show, I’m heading off this morning and have another busy week full of meetings and a sessions so I’m going to apologize in advance for not jumping into the comments that are sure to follow.)

We don’t cover the .Au (Australian) oftern but there are two different stories out today.

The domain name Deals.com.au sold for $100,000 according to the dailytelegraph.com.au to a Company Zoupon which is  the “fifth or sixth largest” group buying website in Australia claiming  around 400,000 members including our Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

“”By purchasing deals.com.au, the company hopes “to get the word out there,” he said, “about how great our offers are”. Mr Same said the group buying space was “a marketplace that’s come from nothing and is just growing and growing.”

“With us you can tell exactly how many customers are coming through the door. It’s a highly-measurable form of marketing.”

Poker.com.au sold last month for $100K as well.

In another unrelated story on .com.au domains today that appeared in  smh.com.au, big business in Australia have been doing a lot of defensive registrations grabbing  domain name which are typo’s of their brands.

The Austrian Registry just crossed the 1,000,000 domain registration mark this morning as reported by DVmag [German]. The registry has run promotions such as the free registration of IDN domains in 2006 or a reduced rate for registrars for new registrations in months of their choice. The registry also is hosting this year’s DomainPulse conference in Vienna in February.

According to DomainQuadrat [German] the 1 millionth domain name registered was welpenparadies.at (= dog-puppy paradise in German) at 4:28pm CET. The official press release was published here by NIC.at.

[via DVmag.de (German)]

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (4)

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