Domainers get there before the dictionary

The new third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English contains more than 2,000 new words, according to reports today, but it looks like domainers will find slim pickings.

For every neologism the dictionary now defines, you’ll find a .com equivalent that was registered years ago, in some cases over a decade ago.

Here are some newly official generic dictionary words, along with the earliest date I could find for their original .com registration.

SoftSkills – May 1996
Turducken – June 1997
ExitStrategy – August 1998
ChillPill – December 1999
CarbonCapture – May 2000
Cheeseball – August 2000
Vuvuzela – May 2004
PayWall – June 2004
Frenemy – February 2005
Defriend – June 2005
Staycation – November 2005
Bromance– April 2006
Microblogging – April 2007
Deleveraging – April 2007
TweetUp – June 2007
Overleveraged – July 2007
ToxicDebt – September 2007
QuantitativeEasing – November 2008
Catastrophizing – April 2009

Not all of these were registered by domainers, of course. Some are in use, though plenty are currently parked or marked for sale.

The Oxford dictionaries cover primarily UK English. Some of these words, like “cheeseball” or “turducken” are Americanisms that clearly saw some lag crossing the Atlantic.

1 Comment Tagged: domaining, oxford dictionary of english

Two registrars get stay of execution

ICANN has given two registrars another year of accreditation, after previously threatening to terminate their contracts for non-payment of fees.

Abansys & Hostytec and Namehouse, two small registrars, have had the terms of their registrar accreditation agreements extended to August 15, 2011 and July 6, 2011, respectively.

In June, ICANN had told both companies they would be de-accredited on July 1, 2010. Together, the two firms owed almost $20,000 in unpaid fees.

Yesterday, a small note appeared on ICANN’s compliance page:

18 August 2010: Abansys & Hostytec, S.L. RAA effective date extended to 15 August 2011.
18 August 2010: Namehouse, Inc. RAA effective date extended to 6 July 2011.

It’s not entirely clear to me whether this means the registrars have paid up or not. Unlike previous occasions, there’s no mention of whether the companies “cured all outstanding contract breaches”.

According to DotAndCo.net, neither registrar has any domains under management in the gTLDs, although Abansys & Hostytec claims to run over 100,000 domains.

3 Comments Tagged: abansys & hostytec, compliance, ICANN, namehouse, raa

ICANN releases (censored) board briefing docs

ICANN has given an unprecedented glimpse into the workings of its board of directors, with the release of hundreds of pages of staff briefing papers.

But the documents are quite heavily redacted, particularly when it comes to some of the more controversial topics.

The documents show what ICANN staffers told the board in the run-up to the Nairobi and Brussels meetings, dealing with important decisions such as .xxx and internationalized domain names.

The Brussels decision to put .xxx back on the track to approval sees more than its fair share of blacked-out text, but the documents do show that ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey’s recommendations were pretty much in line with how the board eventually voted.

Other topics seeing redaction include the implementation of DNSSEC at the root, the activities of the Internet Governance Forum, and specific discussion of IDN ccTLD delegations.

Some topics are deemed so sensitive that even the titles of the pages have been blacked out. But in at least one case somebody apparently forgot to redact the title from the PDF’s internal bookmarks.

So we know, for example, that a section entitled “Chronological-History-ICM” is deemed entirely unpublishable, even though ICANN has previously published a document with pretty much the same title (pdf).

Comment Tagged: cctlds, DNSSEC, ICANN, icm registry, idns, xxx

VeriSign plans single-letter .com auctions

VeriSign has confirmed that it wants to auction off single-character .com domain names, following a test with the equivalent .net domains.

The company recently asked ICANN for permission to sell one and two-letter .net domains. As Andrew Allemann noted at the time, that was a pretty strong indicator it would want to do the same with .com.

Now the company has admitted as much, and is looking for an online auction provider to handle the sales. It published a Request For Proposals today. The RFP says:

VeriSign intends to submit a proposal to ICANN through the RSEP [Registry Services Evaluation Process] and anticipates allocating .com single and two character domain name registrations through an auction as well

One and two-letter domains are currently restricted, due to the potential confusion with country-code TLDs. ICANN has been gradually lifting that restriction in some of the less-popular TLDs.

If VeriSign is also given permission, which seems likely, the auctions would certainly be lucrative.

If o.co can fetch $350,000, how much would Overstock, which has been screaming out for o.com for years, stump up for the .com equivalent? I also recall, years ago, Yahoo saying it wanted y.com.

But VeriSign might not be the main beneficiary of the proceeds. In its .net application, it says that it would use any money raised with the .com auctions for the common good.

VeriSign is not hereby proposing a release of .com single and/or two character domain names. VeriSign anticipates that any such proposal will be structured differently than the proposal for .net and will include use of proceeds from any auction for the benefit of the general Internet community.

That’s open to interpretation, of course. Investing a few million dollars in upgrading its infrastructure could be said to benefit the general internet community.

6 Comments Tagged: .com, .net, auctions, ICANN, verisign

Who voted against three Arabic ccTLDs and why?

Two ICANN board members voted against the recent resolution to grant Arabic top-level domains to Palestine, Jordan and Tunisia, it has emerged.

ICANN has published the preliminary report for its August 5 board meeting, which breaks down the votes for each of the 27 resolutions and provides a minuscule amount of color about the discussions.

While the resolutions approving internationalized domain names for Singapore and Thailand were carried unanimously and without discussion, the three Arabic-script IDNs were discussed and received two negative votes and three abstentions.

So which two board members voted against these ccTLDs and why?

Beats me. The IDN ccTLD fast track process is one area where ICANN is quite secretive, and the report does not break down the substance of the discussion or the identities of the directors.

Strangely, two resolutions I would consider much more controversial faced less opposition.

The report shows that the resolution passing ICM Registry’s .xxx domain to the next stage of approval was carried unanimously, and that only one director voted against the .jobs amendment.

ERE.net has more on the .jobs story.

4 Comments Tagged: .jobs, cctlds, ICANN, icm registry, idns, jordan, new TLDs, palestine, tunisia, xxx