Recent Posts
- Selling off PIR, did ISOC just throw .org registrants under a bus?
- Rival dot-brand bidders in settlement talks, seek auction delay
- ICANN going back to Puerto Rico for a third time
- Montreal airport thinks DI is porn
- DI Leaders Roundtable #2 — Should we kill off “Whois”?
- Former NTIA chief Redl now working for Amazon
- Neustar’s .co contract up for grabs
- US official Heineman joins GoDaddy
- Web.com got pwned
- Surprise! ICANN throws out complaints about .org price caps
- Somber mood as ICANN 66 opens in Montreal
- America has Amazon’s back in gTLD fight at ICANN 66
- New (kinda) geo-TLD rules laid out at ICANN 66
- Emoji domains get a 😟 after broad study
- Industry veteran Jay Daley tapped to lead IETF
- Verisign likely to get its billion-dollar .com pricing windfall
- ICANN enters talks to kill off Whois for good
- Form an orderly queue: New Zealand wants a new back-end
- Brexit hell: .eu suspension plan put on hold
- DI Leaders Roundtable #1 — How many new gTLDs will be applied for next time around?
- Now you don’t have to live in the EU to register a .eu domain, but there’s a catch
- Spam is not our problem, major domain firms say ahead of ICANN 66
- Crunch time, again, for Whois access policy
- Google quietly launches .new domains sunrise
- After .org price outrage, ICANN says it has NOT scrapped public comments
- Hindu god smites Chrysler gTLD
- Top ICANN advisor Tarek Kamel dies at 57
- Three big changes could be coming to .uk
- Introducing… the DI Leaders Roundtable
- After killing the cows, what does the new Tucows logo remind you of?
- Radix acquires another gTLD
- .whoswho survives!
- Correction: the 10 most-used dot-brands
- Nominet raises .uk prices
- Registrar suspended over dodgy transfers
- Mediocre .vote gTLD drops restrictions
- ICANN’s babysitting fund goes live
- Claims auDA boss quit after he was busted for “falsified” law degree
- .bond domains could cost a grand each
- PIR’s “new” .org domain is just temporary. Help it pick another new one!
- MMX switches porn TLDs from Afilias to Uniregistry
- Argentina will use a lottery to decide 2LD landrush
- Sixty gTLD registries not monitoring security threats
- ICANN must do more to fight internet security threats [Guest Post]
- Bumper batch of dot-brands off themselves for Friday 13th
- .org price cap complaints more like “spam” says Ombudsman
- Botterman is new ICANN chair
- Another victory for Amazon as ICANN rejects Colombian appeal
- Kafka turns in grave as ICANN crowbars “useless” Greek TLD into the root
- Sorry, you still can’t sue ICANN, two-faced .africa bidder told
“Ditch .com!” government to tell Indians
Kevin Murphy,
July 27, 2016, 09:49:37 (UTC),
Domain Registries
The Indian government is to urge citizens to register .in domain names instead of .com, according to local reports.
The Economic Times reports today that the Ministry of Economy and IT is to launch a “massive advertising campaign aimed at companies, individuals and startups” promoting .in.
Rajiv Bansal, MEIT joint secretary, is reported as saying the campaign will play up to nationalist sentiments
The government wants to grow .in from about 2.1 million domains to 3 million domains by March next year, it said.
Prices could come down to the $2 to $3 range, the paper said.
The campaign is due to start in a month or so, it was reported.
For a second I thought your title was about my domain name ditch.com 🙂
The problem with .in is that its version of UDRP makes UDRP look like a perfect system. .In decisions are a joke.
You should sell it to Radix or other new gTLD registries, it goes perfectly with “unCOMplicate” and similar themes…
That’s a good idea
I’m sure we will see an explosion of more registrations if the price goes down that much.
Will we ? Price is not the only issue affecting domain registrations in a country like India, local language support is also a challenge in a country that have many of those.
Actually, local language support isn’t nearly as crucial an issue in India as it is in say, China. That said, the Registry has been fairly sporting when it comes to promotions, with most Registrars offering deep discounts anyway. Awareness is a far bigger problem in a nation with over 60 million enterprises.
.IN is a very promising ccTLD, despite flaws in the INDRP. Ultimately the registry will see which side its bread is buttered on, and the market itself will lead to policy revision.
Many Indian .IN investor colleagues of mine are very enthusiastic about this forthcoming ad campaign by NIXI.
Ditch.com … Hard to take seriously a .COM domain that advocates abandoning .COM. Good brand name for other purposes, though.
It is a lot harder for a registry to change the habits of a market when the market itself is still in the early, outward looking phase. Most websites and development in that phase tend to be pitching to a global/export market and the .COM TLD is the most accepted TLD for that purpose. What the .IN registry has to do is to build usage in the .IN ccTLD so that it becomes the First Choice TLD for local businesses and users. Otherwise it will trigger a boom and bust cycle like those seen in .INFO, .XYZ etc. The renewal rates on heavily discounted registrations varies but on free registrations and substantially discounted ones, it is close to 5%.
@John McCormac,
In cases where the advertising is aimed primarly at domainers and pricing is dropped to 50 cents or even 1 penny, then – yes, absolutely – the registry encourages massive speculation by bulk buyers who are very unlikely to put domains to use. So, as you say, the name space locks itself into a boom and bust cycle.
But if the advertising is aimed at real business owners and consumers rather than domainers … and if registrations are only discounted by (say) 50% and not poured out onto the street for a million pennies … then the outcome may be quite different, leading to more real usage. In that scenario, the renewal rates could be much more stable and the doom of a boom/bust cycle averted.
Cheap domains are often felt to be inconsequential by owners who register them without any real deliberation. But “cheap” is relative. If a domainer in Berlin pays $3 for a .IN domain, he may feel little attachment to it. But to an Indian business owner registering his first .IN domain, that $3 (while hardly a fortune) counts for a bit more.