M+M joins .music fight
Minds + Machines parent Top Level Domain Holdings has become the third company to publicly confirm an application for the .music top-level domain.
TLDH has partnered with “music industry figures including artists, managers, music producers and lawyers” going by the name of LHL TLD Investment Partners on a joint-venture bid.
M+M will provide the technical back-end for the applicant.
The other two known applicants for .music are Far Further, which has the backing of most major music trade groups, and the long-running MyTLD/Music.us/Roussos Group campaign.
Assuming Roussos and TLDH can each pull one plausible public comment objection out of the bag, Far Further’s Community Priority Evaluation is probably scuppered.
With two objections, a CPE candidate needs a perfect 14/14 score on the remaining criteria, which is likely going to be pretty difficult when you’re applying for such a generic term.
In other new gTLD applicant news…
.miami — TLDH also announced today that it plans to apply for .miami, having secured the support of City of Miami in a 4-0 vote of its commissioners.
.nyc – The city of New York has reportedly granted its consent to Neustar to apply for .nyc, apparently beating out other wannabe applicants including TLDH.
.vlaanderen – The Flemish government has awarded the right to apply for .vlaanderen (.flanders) to DNS.be. The registry will reportedly work with Nic.at on the application.
.nagoya – GMO Registry has announced a bid for the Japanese city gTLD .nagoya, with the backing of the local government. Nagoya is Japan’s third-largest city.
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Do these suckers…er…sponsors…actually think that there is a demand for such alternative tlds?
There is not and I suspect they will soon learn this the hard way.
Ask O.CO how that worked out for them. If there is such a demand for new domains, why did New.Net fail?
Cells are big. Why did .mobi fail? People want to be pros, yet .PRO failed. People all have names, yet do you know anyone with a .NAME?
Nah, me either.
The entire concept is doomed to fail and to seperate suckers from their money. The only beneficiaries will be the registries, ICANN, consultants and trademark attorneys. No one else.
Don’t waste your money.
I, too, want to sponsor a new tld and hereby affirm my committment to the process…
YES, I am interested in trying to get an unreasonable number of suckers to sign up for my silly gtld and in annually charging them far more than the price of a .com.
YES, I am interested in creating a new, longtail tld which will leak traffic like crazy and only help its .COM counterpart.
YES, I am interested in trying to trick investors into believing that hundreds of thousands of idiots (no, wait…millions!!!) will actually want to set up cyber businesses under our .CRAPOLLA tld when history has clearly shown that there is no interest in alternative extensions.
YES, I am interested in offsetting promotional and advertising efforts of each of the Fortune 500 — all of which exclusively use .COM. I acknowledge that I will also need to offset over 20 years of .COM brainwashing and am willing to certify that I have the trillions of dollars that will be needed to successfully do this.
YES, I am interested in obligating myself to an ICANN contract that makes no sense and am willing to blindly support this business which will most likely be hemmoraging money forevermore with no possible exit strategy. I am prepared to go down with the ship and sell blood, sperm and my wife’s jewelry if necessary since bankrupcy can not be an option.
YES, YES, YES…sign me up! I am very interested!
no matter what I’ll keep using iTunes.
Why am I not surprised? M+M has a tendency to steal other people’s work (especially if other parties have done a lot of work) and try to pretend it is theirs and try to piggy bag others. Antony van Couvering and Fred Krueger and the rest of their gang, including ex-Chairman Dengate Thrush should be ashamed of their business ethics and their whole approach not only on .MUSIC but for .BERLIN and others. That said, I have officially joined the bandwagon of M+M critics and preparing our war chest against the opposition.
The ICANN Board should seriously also look at M+M business practices. This will certainly be a long a drawn out process, including legal. Furthermore, perhaps ICANN can make a good faith donation to M+M to take a course in business ethics 🙂
Soon the .com bubble will burst. All of those who are holding hundreds and thousands of .com domains to make money will soon see their domains are not that worth anymore.
I hope someone will apply for a .software, .system, .solutions etc, gTLDs. I will be the first to register one for my company. People who are giving examples for the failures of .pro, .mobi, .co etc are not understanding one main point. The new gTLDs are not short names but these are exact words and that will definitely make a difference.
Ismail M.
I’m looking through the Guidebook carefully, but I do not see where it says if you buy a bunch of Facebook and MySpace fans and can play three chords on a guitar that no-one else can apply for .MUSIC.
Guys, guys… please!
Don’t duke this out on a blog forum.
File your applications, go through evaluation, hire your lawyers and do what you have to do.
But, seriously, please understand that your sniping at each other on blogs doesnt do either one of you any good. You are only going to say something which you are going to regret later, it doesn’t do anything to advance your applications, and most importantly it doesn’t inspire a whole lot of trust or respect for either of you in the broader community.
Play nice.
John —
Well said. Let’s all play by the rules and abide by them.
Fred
I used to have to listen to this stuff when my boys were a lot younger, on long car trips.
“Tell him to stop hitting me!”
“I’m not hitting him. He took my Pokeman card!”
“I did not, he gave it to me!”
I am not kidding. One time on a ski trip in Maine, I pulled over in freezing weather, told then to take off their shirts and get outside until they decided to quit fighting. Ask MJ, she’ll tell you I’m not joking. I’m a “dog on the roof” kinda guy on those trips.
If we have to listen to this stuff out of you two (or the rest of you knuckleheads) for the next umpteen months I will personally hire a sound crew to find where you live, set up huge speakers, and play North Korean radio propaganda turned up to 11 every night and all G-damned night long until your ears bleed.
Do I make myself clear?
Suitably chastened…
Antony/Fred,
I have a lot to say to both of you and it has nothing to do with the rules in the ICANN guidebook but other more important rules that revolve around business ethics. However, I will remain respectful to the community that reads these boards and of course John Berryhill 🙂
P.S Don’t underestimate how many chords I can play
@ISMAIL:
I choked when I read your last sentence…
“The new gTLDs are not short names but these are exact words and that will definitely make a difference.”
Er… what about .Travel?
Or .Museum? Or .Aero?
Or .Coop? Or .Name?
Yeah, you keep those blinders on and keep on thinking that it was the abbreviation that was the problem.
@ Tim Davids,
I think I’ll stick with Rhapsody. 🙂
The ICANN Board only approved gTLDs because of their collective and individual greed and conflicts of interest.
I have never observed such a high level of cronyism and incestous business dealings in any other organisation.