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The Lowdown



June 23, 2008 Post

Here's the The Lowdown from DNJournal.com! Updated daily to fill you in on the latest buzz going around the domain name industry!

Compiled by Ron Jackson (Editor/Publisher)

 

ICANN's 32nd International public meeting is currently underway in Paris where it will continue through Thursday (June 26). You can review the complete agenda on the ICANN 

website. Several sessions have been devoted to issues surrounding a plan ICANN is considering that would create an unlimited number of new global extensions. My opinion is that we already have enough global extensions including some that are under utilized - .info and .biz - despite being available for several years now. It seems to me it would be wiser to let those extensions get on their feet before flooding the market with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of new extensions.

The fact that .info and .biz have had relatively low adoption rates compared to the original gTLDs, .com, .net and .org, tells me that there is not enough public demand or recognition of new extensions to roll more out at this point in time (even a few more, let alone hundreds more). 

I can only see a flood of new gTLDs creating a lot of confusion among Internet users, with few benefits to anyone other than ICANN (who would reportedly charge anywhere from $39,000 to $390,000 for the rights to operate a new TLD) and perhaps some registrars. An interesting conversation on this topic, initiated by blogger Michael Berkens, is currently underway at TheDomains.com

While we are on the topic of domain extensions and confusion, I have to comment on an item in a newsletter I got this morning from domain registrar Encirca.com. It said "EnCirca introduces 

28 new extensions for you to register, such as us.com, eu.com, de.com, and uk.com..."  These are NOT new extensions but because of this kind of misleading marketing I have had readers argue vociferously with me that they are. These are .com domains period - nothing at all new about them. What Encirca and many other registrars are selling are sub-domains of names like us.com and eu.com that are marketed by CentralNic

Now, I have no problem with the CentralNic business model (they do not make any claims to be providing new extensions), but I do have a problem with registrars leading the public to believe they are getting something they are 

 

not. I've had too many excited newbies ask me how much their domains in these "new" extensions are worth. They think they have discovered great keywords in valuable new extensions and are quite distressed when I have to tell them otherwise. Those that bought with resale in mind will be sorely disappointed because there is virtually no aftermarket interest in sub-domains, aside from the occasional rare bolt of lightning from a blue sky. We will actually be reporting one of those in our next weekly sales column (a name sold at Sedo), but that doesn't change the fact that you will almost certainly go broke investing in sub-domains if you are buying them for PPC or resale purposes. 

One other note today - if you drop by Michael Berkens's site mentioned in our first item above, check out another hot topic - whether or not employees of aftermarket auction houses should be allowed to bid against their company's own customers. This discussion was triggered by a thread at the NamePros.com forum about aftermarket sales reported by DN Journal that 

Andrew Allemann followed up on Sunday by posting some additional background information on auction house policies at DomainNameWire.com. His post, like Michael's, has drawn dozens of reader comments on practices that many consider to be unethical. 

I think the auction venues would be better served if they prohibited their employees from bidding in the company's auctions (as many, including Sedo.com, SnapNames.com and Bido.com currently do). You can see by reading the blog

 and forum posts that a large percentage of bidders will, rightly or wrongly, question the fairness of auctions where company employees are free to bid against them. Since this is an important issue with domain buyers I think that, at the very least, every auction venue should prominently and clearly post their policy on employee bidding so their customers can choose for themselves whether to play by those ground rules or take their business elsewhere. 
(Posted June 23, 2008) 


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