Adrian Kinderis, CEO of AusRegistry International, explains how entrepreneurs and brands can get a slice of the $5 billion domain name industry through the new Top-Level Domain program. In January next year a revolution is set to usher in the most expansive and fundamental change to the Internet in its history. The new Top-Level Domain Program, administered by ICANN, will see web addresses move beyond the traditional .com to .anything in a dramatic shift that will introduce a new platform for creativity and major new revenue streams for online investment. For those not aware, the program will allow brands, entrepreneurs and governments to apply for their own version of .com – moving from pepsi.com to .pepsi for example – and secure a unique slice of Internet real-estate that will dramatically change the way Internet users around the world navigate to find content online. For more information, here is a video of an interview I did with Bloomberg Television about the program. So, now that I’ve got you interested, you’re probably thinking about the best way you can gain a slice of the $5 billion dollar domain name industry. You might be an entrepreneur out to make your next million or a brand looking to make a statement of leadership in the digital space. Here are my top six tips on how you can take advantage of this billion dollar opportunity and own a trusted, regulated slice of Internet ‘real estate’: 1. Don’t try to be the next .com The biggest revenue-making opportunity under the new Top-Level Domain Program lies within the formation of generic word Top-Level Domains. Rather than trying to become the next .com, entrepreneurs should look to create boutique name spaces, turning over lower registration volumes, but at higher margins – the online equivalent of running an exclusive VIP country club. Take .music, which would be created as a targeted name space specifically for the music industry. Such a name space is probably never going be a competitor to .com, however it will hold significant value to the music industry given it will be directly tied to the subject matter and the global music community. Imagine if you could capture even 20 per cent of the roughly 8 million music artists around the world and charge them each $US5 to promote their music under an official .music name space. That’s $US8 million in annual revenue before you consider other potential revenue sources from targeting users with content businesses like concerts.music and reviews.music. So, rather than trying to be all things to all people, think very carefully about your audience before making the move. Because in this game an audience of “everyone” is a very risky move to make. 2. Offer more than just a domain name You are securing a domain name space. You can do so much more that just sell domains. We call it “left of the dot” thinking. What more can you offer that will build value to your namespace? How else can domain names be used? Should you retain premium names rather than sell them and look to monetise those sites by building out content? You are starting with a clean slate here. You set the rules. Be creative and create something that will bring value to your market and provide something different! 3. Commercialise your .brand TLD For brand holders, the benefits of securing a .brand Top-Level Domain are immediately obvious: Trust, leadership, customer engagement and improved message recall. Think creditcards.hsbc, cars.ebay or justdoit.nike and you’re well on the way to capturing the opportunity presented by this unique change. However, a .brand Top-Level Domain can deliver more than this. For instance, imagine eBay securing .eBay and selling a slice of that space to its audience of 94 million registered users at $US2 per vanity domain name fee. Also, with more than 600 million registered users, a username.facebook strategy of a similar nature should be an absolute no-brainer. From a customer engagement perspective, imagine if BMW were to provide all customers with a john.smith.bmw domain name with the purchase of a new vehicle to allow access to critical information such as service scheduling and technical information. Not only would it deliver value to the customer, it would also play a role in the introduction of the customer to the BMW brand experience and lifestyle (car clubs, forums, social networking etc). There will also be huge improvements in online security and trust. Take the bank Chase for example, it would bring clarity and security to customers with the simple message, ‘If it’s not .chase, it’s not us’. Not to mention making it easier for customers to find content online without using Google, because all they will need to remember is investments.chase, for instance. 4. Remove the language barrier For the first time in history, new Top-Level Domains are available in non-Latin scripts and with 60% of the world’s population residing in countries where the native language is based on a script other than Latin, you could be one of the first to capitalise on this latest shift in domain name technology. Imagine what a relevant Chinese script Top-Level Domain could be worth to the thriving Chinese community? 5. Act now The clock is ticking on this limited opportunity. The application window for new Top-Level Domains will open on 12 January 2012 and we’ll start to see new ‘.anything’ domains in operation from late 2012. If companies and entrepreneurs miss the application window (12 January 2012 to 12 April 2012), it may be a long time before they have the same opportunity again. Get moving now to make sure you don’t miss the boat. There is less than 155 days until the application window opens and you’ll need all of that time to make sure your approach is on the money. 6. Seek advice The new Top-Level Domain program is not for the novice – there are few people who can run a slice of the Internet alone – so start with the idea and seek advice from an industry expert such as AusRegistry International who understands the application process, policy and technological infrastructure required to make the most of the new Top-Level Domain opportunity. This is just the starting point. The six tips explained above are just a starting point for a much larger analysis of your idea and associated business case. At AusRegistry International ( www.ausregistry.com ), we are currently working with brands, entrepreneurs and governments across the world in a full service capacity that can cover your entire new Top-Level Domain project from strategy right through to technology and launch marketing services. For more information please visit www.ausregistry.com or find out more about the new Top-Level Domain program here: www.BeyondDotCom.info By Adrian Kinderis, Internet industry thought leader and CEO of AusRegistry International, one of the few companies in the world with the experience and technology to activate and implement new Top-Level Domains. This article by Adrian Kinderis was sourced with permission from the AusRegistry International blog and originally appeared at: www.ausregistry.com/blog/?p=838

The year’s second seven-figure sale, and the year’s biggest to date, topped the weekly sales chart to 7 August. Social.com sold for $2.6 million through Moniker/NameQuiver, easily surpassing the year’s second-biggest sale, DomainName.com, which sold for an even $1 million back in May. In a sales chart covering two weeks due to Domain Name Journal holidays, there was one other sale over $100,000, that of UcakBileti.com (”flight ticket” in Turkish) that sold for $250,000 through NoktaDomains. Jewel.com was the third biggest sale of the week, selling for $74,333, and also the first Sedo sale on the chart. Overall there were 27 .COM domains in the top 40 chart and Sedo sold 24 of the domains with one other being a collaboration between Sedo, Moniker and SnapNames. There were also 11 sales through AfternicDLS. There were ten ccTLD sales, with the top seller being fr.cc, selling for $50,000 and three non-.COM gTLD sales. To see the full listing of Domain Name Journal’s top reported sales in the fortnight to 7 August, check out: dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2011/20110713.htm

Businesses are going defensive with .XXX with 80 per cent of pre-registrations coming from outside the adult industry says one UK-based registrar. The registrar, Easyspace, while accounting for only a few hundred pre-registrations, says businesses and individuals have been able to register their interests for the new .XXX domain name registrations ahead of the launch of the .XXX pre-registrations facility with Easyspace.com and only 20 per cent of those interests are from the sexually oriented adult industry. “As we expected, the early indications are that non-adult industry businesses have realised the need to protect trademarks and brands in dot XXX,” said Sarah Haran, Managing Director of Easyspace. For those interested in registering .XXX domain names, the launch process will follow the following: SUNRISE A – 7 Sept – 28 Oct Sunrise A is dedicated to members of the adult Sponsored Community with either verifiable trademark rights or owners of exact matching domains in other IANA TLDs which is also known as “Grandfathering.” SUNRISE B – 7 Sept – 28 Oct Sunrise B was created especially for non-adult Intellectual Property holders who are non-members of the adult Sponsored Community with verifiable trademark rights so they can block their domains in the .XXX sTLD. LANDRUSH – 8 Nov – 25 Nov Landrush is for members of the adult Sponsored Community but NOT on a first come, first served basis.  Unlike Sunrise A and Sunrise B, there are no qualification requirements needed for Landrush.  Applications for competing names will go to a closed-auction at the end of the Landrush period. GENERAL AVAILABILITY – From 6 December on General Availability is when members of the adult Sponsored Community get regular, resolving names on a first come, first served basis.  Non-members of the adult Sponsored Community can also get “Non-Resolving” names. To pre-register your .XXX domain name, check out America Registry here .

Centralnic’s GB.COM is no longer pointing to their nameservers reports Michele Neylon on his Internet News website. Neylon also says that any domains in the zone are now being wildcarded to the main GB.COM website. Upon going to the GB.COM website, the following notice is posted: Welcome to the GB.com site You may be here because you have been sold a domain or email service using the gb.com domain that has ceased to work. You can restore that service swiftly by registering with GB.COM Ltd. GB.COM Ltd will not provide a service that you have paid others for, unless they have an arrangement with GB.COM Ltd. If you have already paid for future service and it has ceased then you should contact your supplier. If you have any queries please send us an email and we will endeavour to answer your questions. GB.COM Ltd. In response, CentralNic have posted the following notice on their website: Notice Regarding GB.COM Domains Unfortunately, the service we have been providing for domains ending .gb.com has been interrupted. We apologize for any inconvenience – the interruption was effected without warning by a third party and was out of our control. We are currently taking legal advice about this and will be taking urgent steps to restore the service. But we cannot achieve that instantly. In the interim we are taking every action possible to ensure that .gb.com websites continue to function during the temporary period before our service is restored, to mitigate any losses to our clients. Neylon, who manages registrar Blacknight Solutions , did a bit of poking around in Whois records and found the nameservers for GB.COM were switched away from CentralNic over to Bytemark earlier on the day in question. Neylon further notes that all the other Whois records seem to be unchanged. On his posting, Neylon notes several updates from CentralNic with the final one being from one of CentralNic’s staff stating: We have started creating accounts with Gb.com Ltd for our registrars, and registering their domains into them. Although we don’t believe that Gb.com Ltd has any right to do what they’ve done, we feel that this is the best course of action to get our registrant’s domains working, until we can resolve the legal issue and bring gb.com back onto our registry infrastructure. We are working in descending size order, so the largest registrar portfolios are being cleared first. As we are having to use a screen-scraping script to submit the information, it’s a slow process, taking 4-5 seconds per domain. We have already registered those domains that are directly registered with us, with no registrar. For further updates and additional information, see Michele Neylon’s Internet News blog at: www.internetnews.me/2011/07/30/centralnics-gb-com-in-dispute-gb-com-now-wildcarded

Most people may use a search engine to go to their website of choice, but there are still some internet users who go to at least some of their websites by typing in the domain name, and the most popular type-in is Facebook.com followed by Google.com. And if you want to typosquat a domain name, the best domain name to have is Faceboook.com. These are the findings from six months of data collected and analysed by Chris Finke from his Firefox browser add-on URL Fixer. URL Fixer corrects typos in URLs that you enter in the address bar. For example, if you type google.con, it will correct it to google.com (asking first, if you enable confirmation). Finke analysed more than 7.5 million URL bar entries and he found that facebook.com is by far the most typed in domain name, three times more popular than the second most popular typed in domain – google.com, although google.com is still the most popular website. The reason for this is many people get to Google via the search or address bar in their browser rather than going to the Google website. Likewise, Yahoo is the seventh most popular address but is a top five domain. The top ten type-in domain names are facebook.com (with 9% of all type-ins) followed by google.com (3.3%), youtube.com (3.3%), gmail.com (1.1%), twitter.com (1.1%), mail.google.com (0.6%), yahoo.com (0.6%), hotmail.com (0.6%), amazon.com (0.5%) and reddit.com (0.5%). The most commonly mistyped domain names after faceboook.com are googe.com and goole.com. However as a proportion of typed-in domain names, very few end up at scam websites with only one type-in ending up at a scam site once for every 7,390 times the correct Facebook address is typed in. And .COM domains make up 63 per cent of all typed in top level domains followed by .ORG (4%), .NET (4%)and .DE (4%), reflecting both on some of the more popular TLDs and where Finke’s add-on is popular. Rounding out the top nine are .RU (2%) then .HU, .FR, co.uk and .BR (all 1%). The top 17 TLD typos are all variations of .com. In order of frequency, they are .com, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, “.com,”, .vom, .comn, .com’, “.co,”, .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom. The most popular non-.com/.net/.org domains: google.de, vkontakte.ru (a Russian social network), and google.fr. Facebook and Google dominated worldwide according to Finke’s analysis with the only locales where neither Google nor Facebook control the most popular domain are ru-RU (Russia – vkontakte.ru), fi-FI (Finland – aapeli.com, a gaming website), ko-KR (Korea – fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China – baidu.com). And finally in his analysis Finke notes that none of the domains with more than a 0.0005 per cent share are unregistered, indicating that this kind of usage data would not be very useful to a scammer or phisher looking for new domain names. The full analysis by Chris Finke is available at www.chrisfinke.com/2011/07/25/what-do-people-type-in-the-address-bar .

It was with great interest that I read a recent announcement about a plan by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to publish template answers on a wiki for the 22 questions relating to registry technical operations contained within ICANN’s new Top-Level Domain Applicant Guidebook. As someone who has spent the best part of six years following the development of the program (witnessing first-hand each evolution of the Applicant Guidebook) my first thought was one of bemusement – How can a generic solution taken “off the shelf” accurately demonstrate whether an applicant is capable of understanding the technical requirements for setting up and operating a new Top-Level Domain? Quite frankly, it can’t. The application process for new Top-Level Domains (TLD) has been carefully designed by ICANN to thoroughly examine whether an applicant has performed the required research to adequately understand what it means to own and operate a vital piece of Internet infrastructure. Operating a TLD is a huge responsibility that should not be taken lightly. The application process has been created in its current format to determine this. For the applicant, the risk of landing in Extended Evaluation, ICANN’s special audit system for applications that require further attention, is far too great to be toying with a one size fits all approach. In an attempt to save money, applicants will instead be at risk of losing at least $150,000 should their application fail the evaluation criteria set by ICANN. While consultants working closely with the ITU are correct in stating that applicants do not have to be currently operating Domain Name Registry Systems, they still must identify the technical solution that supports the specific Registry requirements of the application in question. The financial and organisational descriptions must do the same. The solution proposed by the ITU becomes even more unrealistic when you consider the following: Registry technical operations must identify the intended registry system specifications such as: domain name lifecycle, servers, software, infrastructure, data centres, bandwidth providers, policies & procedures etc. Those who know will agree that this is impossible to do generically. Any Registry Services provider worth a pinch of salt is offering the ‘technical operations’ component of the application free of charge with their back-end registry services solution. One has to question whether the approach suggested by the ITU is one that delivers a significant increase in risk without actually delivering any tangible cost reduction? This is not a turnkey solution. Applicants will still be required to provide answers to non technical and financial sections, answers which need to be consistent with the information provided in the technical sections of the application, so those who consider the ITU’s approach will struggle to establish consistency throughout all sections of the application. Without having properly researched, designed and finally settled on a technical solution, whether that be to outsource to industry experts, or build in-house, Applicants will not have the ability to identify information for other areas of the application such as Registry set up and operational costs that will be critical to the successful development of sound and accurate financials. Further, how will applicants be able to demonstrate to ICANN that the technical specifications provided can be delivered on? From my perspective, taking answers from another entity (whose content has no relation to any registry system (real or proposed)) clearly demonstrates two things: 1) You are proficient with the cut and paste function of your keyboard and; 2) You clearly lack the understanding necessary to manage a critical piece of Internet infrastructure such as a new Top-Level Domain. As any high school student can tell you, cutting and pasting answers from a wiki is prone to failure. Although the ITU claim that only ‘approved contributors’ will be able to edit the information, it is unclear how someone would be granted ‘approved contributor’ status. With the highly competitive nature of the TLD process, Applicants should be aware that the accuracy of the information contained within the template has the potential to be highly dubious and potentially even prone to subtle sabotage. I have no doubt that ICANN’s evaluators will be on the lookout for these responses, just like any good teacher would do. The message to prospective applicants here is simple: If you show disrespect to the evaluators and don’t give the technical criteria of your application the attention it truly deserves, then why should they take your application seriously. I am left with two equally horrifying questions: 1). Is this simply an attempt by the ITU to devalue and undermine the entire new TLD application process (and therefore ICANN)? 2). Does anyone at the ITU truly understand the goals of the application process and what it is intended to do? Were the ITU’s ambitions truly altruistic, they would spend their efforts providing capability advice and skills to the community. This approach would be useful and would not water down the quality of submissions to ICANN, as this solution almost certainly will. Finally, this blog does not set out to be self-serving. Yes, there is a level of confidence that comes with choosing a back-end registry provider that is established and experienced. However, ICANN has ensured that anyone who can fulfil the technical requirements will be awarded a TLD Registry. So, the point I am making is that the process of fulfilling the technical requirements of a new TLD Registry involves more than a simple cut and paste. It requires communicating a level of understanding that a new TLD is a piece of mission critical infrastructure and that there are enormous responsibilities that come with this. This posting by Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer at AusRegistry International , was sourced from: www.ausregistry.com/blog/?p=823

SIDN have launched a new programme for .NL registrants whose domain names are vital to their activities or have a high financial value. The new service provided by the .NL registry gives registrants extra control over their domains and means registration details cannot be changed without the registrant’s explicit agreement and prior consent. To receive this service registrants need to apply through their registrar. For full details, see the information leaflet, procedural description and Terms and Conditions of Service, all of which are available from the SIDN announcement page for .NL Control in the bottom right corner under ‘Downloads’ here or contact your registrar. To register your .NL domain name, or if you want some more information on .NL Control apart from what is available on the SIDN website, check out Europe Registry here .