People are forgetting .com exists — ICANN survey

Have you ever heard of .com, .net and .org?

That question was posed to 3,349 domain name registrants in 24 countries by market research firm Nielsen this June and guess what — awareness of all three cornerstone gTLDs was down on a comparable 2015 survey.

Unbelievably, only 85% of respondents professed to be aware of .com’s existence, compared to 86% in 2015.

Equally unbelievably, awareness of .net and .org fell from 76% to 69% and from 70% to 65% respectively between 2015 and 2016, the survey found.

Those are just three among many hundreds of findings of the Nielsen survey, which was carried out in order to inform ICANN’s Competition, Consumer Trust & Consumer Choice Review.

The CCT is one of the reviews deemed mandatory before ICANN is able to launch the next round of new gTLD applications.

A great many of the numbers revealed by the survey are seriously open to question — some could even be empirically proven wrong.

But David Dickinson, project lead for Nielsen on the survey, told DI yesterday that the numbers themselves are less important than the trends, or lack thereof, that they might represent.

Nielsen carried out two surveys in 2015 — one of consumers and one of registrants — then repeated both surveys again a year later.

Respondents were selected from a pool of people who have at some point indicated to third-party market research companies that they are available to take surveys online, Dickinson said. They are usually compensated via some kind of redeemable loyalty points scheme.

The registrant surveys were limited to those who said they have registered a domain name. The consumer survey was limited to those who said they spend more than five hours a week online.

While the number of respondents were measured in the low thousands, the idea is that they provide a representative sample of all internet users and domain name registrants.

But there’s a lot of weirdness in the numbers.

Dickinson said that the 85% awareness number for .com could be due partly to random “mechanical errors” — people clicking the wrong buttons on their survey form — but said that lack of awareness was more common among younger respondents who were more likely to be aware of newer, less generic TLDs.

The surveys also highlighted a bizarre split in TLD awareness between consumers and registrants.

Given that registrants are a subset of consumers, and given that they are by definition more familiar with domain names, you’d expect respondents to the registrant surveys to show higher TLD awareness than those responding to the consumer surveys.

But the opposite was true.

The surveys found, for example, that 95% of consumers knew about .com, but only 85% of registrants did. For .net and .org the numbers were 88%/69% and 83%/65% respectively. None of it makes any sense.

Dickinson said that the 2015 consumer/registrant awareness numbers were “almost identical”.

“My only real conclusion here is that [in 2016] there was some systematic difference in the diligence that the registrants selected these names on these awareness questions, and that a large portion of that is just due to random variation,” he said.

“However, when we do look at those people who are registering new gTLDs, they tended to have much lower awareness of those legacy gTLDs than those people who were unaware or had not registered those new gTLDs,” he said.

“The people who said they did not recognize any of those new gTLDs at all the are very very centric on the legacy gTLDs and in particular .com,” he said.

“I think the data is overstated because of the random variation but there is a learning here when we break it down… that those legacy domains are becoming less relevant or less noticed by the younger people and the people who are registering these new gTLDs,” he said.

“I think there is a shift going on, but it’s not as big as what is stated here [in the numbers],” he said.

The surveys also looked at awareness and registration levels for new, 2012-round gTLDs, but again the numbers probably don’t accurately reflect reality.

For example, 39% of registrants claimed to have heard of .email domain names and 15% claimed to have actually registered one.

Again, these numbers don’t seem plausible. There are fewer than 60,000 .email domains in existence today. Even if there were only one million domain registrants in the world, 15% registration rate would mean at least 150,000 names should have been sold.

Dickinson said that this number could have been higher due to selection bias. The survey took about half an hour on average to fill out, so people more personally interested or invested in internet or domain name related stuff might have been more likely to stick around and complete it.

Interestingly, new gTLD awareness rates in North America were substantially lower than awareness elsewhere in the world. For example, only 25% of North Americans professed to have heard of .news, but that grew to 42% in Asia where most languages use a different script.

My sense here is that respondents — which all took the surveys in their native languages — may have just been clicking to confirm English words they recognized, rather than TLDs they had seen in the wild.

Nielsen clearly suspected that there would be an element of “false recall” among respondents because it actually included some fake TLDs among the real ones.

This led to findings such as: 26% of Africans have heard of .cairo, 17% of North Americans have heard of .toronto and 21% of South Americans have heard of .bogota.

None of those city TLDs exist.

Dickinson explained this as “assumed familiarity”.

“What very much seems to happen is that if something has an implied ‘face validity’ — it seems to make sense or seems to be readily interpretable — then those ones will get higher stated awareness than the ones that are just random letters, such as .xyz,” he said.

Indeed, while there are over six million .xyz domains out there today, with high-profile registrants including Google, only 13% of respondents claimed to be aware of it.

“The more implied familiarity or sense of familiarity there is, the more likely people are to feel like they’ve been there or seen it, so it’s definitely a false recall, but the learning from that is that the more interpretable… those things are then they have more easy acceptance by consumers than things that are not interpretable,” Dickinson said.

The surveys did not only cover awareness and registration patterns. There are literally hundreds of data points in there covering different perceptions of TLDs new and old. I’ve just focused here on the ones that made me question whether the survey was worth the time, expense and paper it was written on.

But Dickinson said that the raw numbers are not necessarily what the ICANN review teams should be looking at.

“Maybe the absolute number is not exactly dead-on, but what are the relationships between the numbers?” he said.

“I tend to look at the relationships, so for example one of the objectives of doing this survey was to see if the new gTLD program impacted the perception of the industry in any way, or trustworthiness in the industry,” he said.

“For example, we can say we’re not sure it improved — the numbers didn’t change significantly in that direction to allow us to definitively say it improved — but it certainly did not decline,” he said. “We can rule out that it declined.”

“Overall, we can say that the new gTLD program is emerging with fairly strong awareness, relative,” he said.

“We can also say with certainty that none of those new gTLDs are anywhere approaching the awareness of the legacy gTLDs, and even if there is some erosion in the legacy gTLDs it’s going to take a long time for those to reach parity, if they ever do,” he said.

The Nielsen surveys are one input to the work of the volunteer CCT Review Team, which intends to publish its preliminary report before the end of the year.

CCT-RT chair Jonathan Zuck recently published a blog post on the ICANN web site giving a progress report on recent work.

Barcelona picked for ICANN 63

ICANN will head to Barcelona, Spain for its 63rd public meeting, the organization’s board of directors has decided.

ICANN 63, that year’s Annual General Meeting, is due to take place October 20 to October 26, 2018. The specific venue has not yet been revealed.

That’s quite a way in the future. Venues have not yet been selected for the first two meetings of 2018, which will take place in ICANN’s North America and Latin America and Caribbean regions.

We’re currently up to ICANN 57, which is due to start in about six weeks in Hyderabad, India (start looking into visas today if you haven’t already).

Next year, meetings will be held in Copenhagen in March, Johannesburg in June and Abu Dhabi in October.

Barcelona was selected for 63 at an ICANN board meeting last week.

The city, Spain’s second most populous, is in the Catalonia region of Spain and is home to the .cat sponsored gTLD.

Destroy ICANN! Destroy ICANN with missiles!

The year is 2016. The Kenyan Muslim president of the United States is poised to hand over control of the internet to the United Nations in an attempt to silence lunatic conspiracy theorists Matt Drudge and Alex Jones for good.

But you can help, by engaging in missile warfare with ICANN and the UN.

That’s the deranged premise of ICANN Command, a little browser game that appeared online this week.

It’s a knock-off of the 1980 Atari classic Missile Command. The intro reads:

You will be defending actual Internet domains from UN attack! Launch surface-to-air missiles in time to destroy UN Domain Seeking Missiles. If a UN missile reaches a domain, that domain is lost forever.

Or, call your senator right now!

This related video explains more.

It’s obviously been inspired by the anti-Obama rhetoric of Senator Ted Cruz and Wall Street Journal op-eds of L Gordon Crovitz, which have fed a fringe right-wing conspiracy theory that sees the UN taking control of the internet come October 1.

That’s the date the US government proposes to remove itself from its oversight role in ICANN’s IANA functions.

After that, ICANN will be overseen by a new multistakeholder process in which everybody, not the UN, has a voice.

InfoWars.com and DrudgeReport.com are safe, sadly.

You can check out the game here if you wish. I scanned it for viruses and mind-control rays and it seems safe.

US claims option to delay IANA transition as Cruz launches free speech doomsday clock

The US government has told ICANN that it may extend the current IANA functions contract for a year, should something unexpected happen this month.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration wrote to ICANN (pdf) yesterday, to provide “preliminary notice” that it could extent the contract until September 30, 2017, if a “significant impediment” should occur before October 1, 2016.

It appears to be a formality. NTIA said:

the department intends to allow the IANA functions contract to expire as of October 1, 2016, barring any significant impediment. This notice preserves the Government’s rights under the contract during this interim period should there be a change in circumstance.

Under the contract, NTIA is allowed to extend the term for another year in the last 15 days of the current term, but it has to give 30 days notice to ICANN if it wants to do so.

NTIA assistant secretary Larry Strickling told ICANN (pdf) a couple weeks ago that it plans to allow the IANA contract to expire — thereby removing NTIA’s piddling influence in root zone management — October 1.

But the move is facing continued criticism from increasingly unhinged elements of the American political right, who have got it into their heads that the transition means Russia and China will be able to take over ICANN and crush free speech online.

The campaign has been spearheaded by Senator Ted Cruz and whoever pulls the strings of Wall Street Journal columnist L Gordon Crovitz, and has roped in a multitude of hard-right think-tanks.

The latest publicity push for the campaign saw Cruz yesterday launch a countdown clock on its Senate web page.

Cruz’s site states:

If that proposal goes through, countries like Russia, China, and Iran could be able to censor speech on the Internet, including here in the U.S. by blocking access to sites they don’t like.

None of that is true, needless to say.

But the anti-transition sentiment is strong enough that it’s not impossible that there will be a “significant impediment” to the transition before October 1 — a legal injunction against the Federal government, perhaps — and the extension will enable ICANN to run IANA under the current regime for another year.

Tata ponders “buy a school” strategy to release .tata from limbo

Tata Group is reportedly considering buying a school for the Moroccan province of Tata in order to unlock the .tata gTLD.

The huge Indian conglomerate has been prevented from acquiring its own dot-brand because it matches the name of the tiny region, which is as protected geographic string under ICANN rules.

Without the express permission of Morocco, Tata will not get its desired domain.

According to the New Indian Express newspaper, the company has now reached out to the Indian government in an attempt to open diplomatic channels with Morocco and finally resolve the issue.

The paper cites an unnamed “official” as stating that buying a new school for the province may be the best way to “open the door” to a formal non-objection.

That has precedent.

New gTLD registry Punto 2012, managed to get a non-objection for its .bar application from Montenegro by offering to pay $100,000, spread over 10 years, to fund a school in the Bar region of the country.

Tata came close to acquiring .tata in 2014.

It was the final new gTLD application to pass its evaluation, after it managed to produce a letter from Morocco that was taken as a non-objection.

But Morocco’s digital minister subsequently objected, denying that the government had permitted the use of the string.

Tata’s application was then returned to its Geographic Names Review, which it flunked last December.

Since then, the bid has been marked “Will Not Proceed”, a status that usually only changes when an application is withdrawn.