New TLD Applicants Should Carefully Consider Their Filing Status

Earlier this year, Employ Media, the company that was awarded the .jobs Sponsored TLD in 2005, filed a claim against ICANN stating that ICANN didn’t have a right to enforce their registry contract in the way they were doing. On July 22nd, 2011, ICANN published its answer to Employ Media’s claim. Although this is going to go under arbitration, it demonstrates that ICANN is serious about enforcing registry agreements.

According to ICANN, .jobs charter was to serve Human Resources professionals within companies. Employ Media, however, eventually chose to issue 40,000 generic .jobs domain names to one company, apparently close to the registry, and open a universe of job boards and advertising portals on these domains. They call the network Universe.jobs.

I don’t know who is going to win this arbitration battle, but I think there are lessons in it for new TLD applicants.

1. Be very thoughtful about whether you are going to apply for a Community TLD or a Standard Application. It appears that, unless you have really good backing from a community, it will be difficult to qualify.

2. Make sure to either leave things open for change or be clear that your plans are to actually do what you say you will do in your application. If Employ Media’s case is any indication of the future, ICANN will enforce your registry contract.

You can see ICANN’s response to the .jobs complaint here…

You can see the .jobs registry contract here.

ICANN’s New gTLD Timeline can be seen here.

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.Com & .Net Domain Prices to Rise in January

A few years ago, ICANN gave Verisign the right to raise prices each year.  If I recall correctly, they can raise their prices around 7% per year without any further justification during the term of the contract.  Verisign claims that rising costs in keeping the dns secure makes increases necessary. Of course, this makes it more difficult for domain investors to justify holding domains, especially since Pay Per Click revenue shares have decreased over the past few years.

Verisign’s press release is below…

DULLES, VA (Marketwire) – VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world, today announced, effective Jan. 15, 2012, an increase in registry domain name fees for .com and .net, per its agreements with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Verisign announced that as of Jan. 15, 2012, the registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 and that the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.

Continued strong global Internet usage growth, along with increasingly powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks leveled against all parts of the Internet’s critical infrastructure, have dramatically increased the demands on Internet infrastructure providers such as Verisign. In the last five years, the volume of Domain Name System (DNS) queries on Verisign’s global Internet infrastructure has more than doubled, increasing to an average daily query load of 57 billion in the first quarter of 2011. Future growth is expected to occur at an even faster pace. Verisign’s infrastructure has maintained 100 percent operational security, accuracy and stability for more than a decade due to continued innovation and investment in the infrastructure.

About Verisign
VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) is the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world. Billions of times each day, Verisign helps companies and consumers all over the world to connect online with confidence. Additional news and information about the company is available at www.verisigninc.com.

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TLD Statistics – Numbers in Various gTLDs as of February 2011

Have you wondered about the list of generic top level domains (gTLDS) or how many domain names exist in the existing top level domains?  I’m always looking for lists and statistics on this information so I thought I’d share some recent TLD stats with you here:

Here are some overall numbers I acquired from ICANN as of February 2011…

  • .aero     7,300
  • .asia     190,000
  • .biz     2,120,000
  • .cat     48,000
  • .com     95,000,000
  • .coop     7,000
  • .info     7,400,000
  • .jobs     42,000
  • .mobi     978,000
  • .museum     449
  • .name     230,000
  • .net     14,000,000
  • .org     9,000,000
  • .pro     100,000
  • .tel     300,000
  • .travel     26,000

Many companies are looking for this information to help them build their business cases for new TLDs.  I hope that this helps. These are official numbers from ICANN (as of February 2011).

If you need help in building your business case for a new Top Level Domain, please contact us.

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CentralNic Secures and Greens the Web, As .US.ORG Enters General Availability

Enhancing its commitment to a higher standard of social responsibility and ethical behavior on the web, domain extension .US.ORG today enters general availability with two unprecedented security and environmental measures from Registry Service Provider, CentralNic.

* To coincide with the launch of .US.ORG, CentralNic has succeeded in attaining CarbonNeutral® company certi?cation by reducing its carbon footprint to net zero, taking the lead on environmental commitment within the domain name industry.
* CentralNic’s .US.ORG is the world’s first domain to be launched with DNSSEC enabled. Introduced by ICANN as a requirement for new top-level domains, DNSSEC is an added security feature which CentralNic pioneered, introducing the measure across 25 domain extensions during 2010 and 2011.

To achieve CarbonNeutral® status, CentralNic worked with The CarbonNeutral Company, one of the world’s leading carbon offset and carbon management businesses. All the emissions relating to the company, including energy consumption, waste and business travel, are quanti?ed and then reduced through combining internal changes (for example, using virtualization technology and more efficient servers to reduce power consumption in its data centers, increasing recycling and implementing low carbon vehicles) with carbon offsetting. Through offsetting, every tonne of CO2 is matched by an equivalent amount saved by a significant renewable energy or resource conservation project.

“We are thrilled to work with CentralNic, whose dedication to environmental sustainability was evident in its desire to be a pioneer for carbon neutral operations in the domain name industry,” said Rebecca Fay, Marketing Director, The CarbonNeutral Company.

Working with Xelerance Corporation, .US.ORG offers the highest level of security with DNSSEC, a new technology that secures the link between domain names and IP addresses – a previously insecure connection could be intercepted by hackers to divert Internet users to malicious websites.

“Obviously if CentralNic was one of those carbon-billowing Registry Service Providers without full DNSSEC implementation across all its domains, we could not hold true to .US.ORG’s socially-responsible philosophy,” said Ben Crawford, CEO, CentralNic. “Now with the launch of .US.ORG as the first DNSSEC-enabled and carbon neutral domain, domain owners and the public can feel confident that they are using the most secure and environmentally-conscious space that the Internet has to offer today.”

“And new TLD applicants from government, not-for-profits or business will enjoy these same security and environmental benefits when using CentralNic’s technical services,” Crawford added.

CentralNic announced .US.ORG in March 2011 with a ground-breaking intellectual property protection program that provided brand and trademark owners with six years of free registration. .us.org domain names can be registered through such leading registrars as eNom and Gandi.

About the Carbonneutral Company

The Carbon Neutral Company is a world leading provider of carbon reduction solutions. It works with more than 500 businesses in 32 countries to develop offset inclusive carbon reduction programs which enable companies to increase revenue, manage costs and engage stakeholders. Since 1997, it has purchased carbon credits from more than 200 projects in 24 countries.

About .US.ORG

.US.ORG is a new domain extension for organizations, projects, websites and people with a higher purpose than simply maximizing profits. As a leader in the ethical and responsible use of domain names, .US.ORG will be announcing continued innovations in such areas as: trademark protection, security and stability, environmental responsibility and bridging the “digital divide”.

Note: I work for CentralNic.

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