Happy 10th birthday new TLDs!
With all the excitement about ICANN’s weekend publication of the new top-level domain Applicant Guidebook, it’s easy to forget that “new” TLDs have been around for a decade.
Tomorrow, November 16, is the 10th anniversary of the ICANN meeting at which the first wave of new gTLDs, seven in total, were approved.
The recording of the 2000 Marina Del Rey meeting may look a little odd to any relative newcomers to ICANN.
The open board meeting at which the successful new registries were selected took well over six hours, with the directors essentially making up their selection policies on the spot, in the spotlight.
It was a far cry from the public rubber-stamping exercises you’re more likely to witness nowadays.
Take this exchange from the November 2000 meeting, which seems particularly relevant in light of last week’s news about registry/registrar vertical integration.
About an hour into the meeting, chairman Esther Dyson tackled the VI idea head on, embracing it:
the notion of a registry with a single registrar might be offensive on its own, but in a competitive world I don’t see any problem with it and I certainly wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand
To which director Vint Cerf, Dyson’s eventual successor, responded, “not wishing to be combative”:
The choices that we make do set some precedents. One of the things I’m concerned about is the protection of users who register in these various top-level domains… If you have exactly one registrar per registry, the failure of either the registrar or the registry is a serious matter those who people who registered there. Having the ability to support multiple registrars, the demonstrated ability to support multiple registrars, gives some protection for those who are registering in that domain.
Odd to think that this ad-hoc decision took ten years to reverse.
It was a rather tense event.
The audience, packed with TLD applicants, had already pitched their bids earlier in the week, but during the board meeting itself they were obliged to remain silent, unable to even correct or clarify the misapprehensions of the directors and staff.
As a rookie reporter in the audience, the big news for me that day was the competition between the three registries that had applied to run “.web” as a generic TLD.
Afilias and NeuStar both had bids in, but they were competing with Image Online Design, a company that had been running .web in an alternate root for a number of years.
Cerf looked like he was going to back the IOD bid for a while, due to his “sympathy for pioneers”, but other board members were not as enthusiastic.
I was sitting immediately behind company CEO Christopher Ambler at the time, and the tension was palpable. It got more tense when the discussion turned to whether to grant .web to Afilias instead.
Afilias was ultimately granted .info, largely due to IOD’s existing claim on .web. NeuStar’s application was not approved, but its joint-venture bid for .biz was of course successful.
This was the meat of the resolution:
RESOLVED [00.89], the Board selects the following proposals for negotiations toward appropriate agreements between ICANN and the registry operator or sponsoring organization, or both: JVTeam (.biz), Afilias (.info), Global Name Registry (.name), RegistryPro (.pro), Museum Domain Management Association (.museum), Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques (.aero), Cooperative League of the USA dba National Cooperative Business Association (.coop);
If any of this nostalgia sounds interesting, and you want to watch seven hours of heavily pixelated wonks talking about “putting TLDs into nested baskets”, you can find the video (.rm format, that’s how old it is) of the MDR board meeting buried in an open directory here.
Afilias adds DNSSEC to .info zone
The .info domain has become the latest gTLD to be signed with DNSSEC, the security standard for domain name lookups.
Afilias, which runs the .info registry, said today that it has signed its zone and added the necessary records to the DNS root.
DNSSEC is designed to prevent cache poisoning attacks, which can be used to hijack domain names and carry out phishing campaigns.
For registrants, DNSSEC in .info doesn’t mean much in practical terms yet. If you have a .info, you’ll have to wait for registrars to start to support the standard.
At the moment, only 19 second-level .info domains, including afilias.info and comcast.info, have been signed, as part of a “friends and family” testbed program.
The .org zone, which Afilias also provides the back-end for, was signed in June.
Neustar added full DNSSEC support for .biz in August, according to an announcement this week.
For .com and .net, VeriSign is currently planning to roll out the technology in the first quarter of 2011.
Registrars “unprepared” for DNSSEC
Only one in 10 domain name registrars believes it is fully prepared to offer DNSSEC services today, according to new research out from Afilias, the .info registry.
The Registrar DNSSEC Readiness Report (pdf) also shows that a perceived lack of customer demand for the technology has translated into ambivalence at most registrars.
DNSSEC is a standard extension to DNS that helps prevent domain name hijacking through man-in-the-middle attacks.
The survey shows that 9.86% of registrars say they are “fully prepared” to offer DNSSEC to customers now, with 52.2% saying they were “somewhat” prepared. The remainder were not at all prepared.
A little over a quarter of respondents rated DNSSEC a “high” priority for the next 12 months, with less than 3% saying it was an “extremely high” priority.
Two of the biggest reasons for the lack of urgency were lack of customer demand – 59% of registrars said they saw no demand at all – and difficulties developing key management systems.
Despite this, when asked the question “Should TLD registries support DNSSEC?”, a whopping 80% responded in the affirmative.
I expect interest in the technology will pick up early next year, when VeriSign signs the .com zone.
The Afilias survey was conducted electronically earlier this month. The sample size was quite small, with only 71 respondents, and most of them were on the smaller side by domain count.
The report was released to coincide with Afilias’ launch of a broad effort to add DNSSEC support to all of the TLDs for which it provides registry services.
The company already offers the technology in .org, and that will now be extended to gTLDs including .info and ccTLDs such as .in. You can read the release at CircleID.
Coupons.info sells for over $17,000
Go Daddy might be currently giving away .info domains as freebies when you buy a .com, but that doesn’t mean they’re all worthless.
Coupons.info has just sold through Sedo auction for $17,600, easily the priciest recent .info sale I can recall.
It looks as if the transaction closed yesterday, with the domain now redirecting to its new owner’s existing site at allcouponsdirect.com.
The seller had held a reserve price of $7,000, so I’m guessing he’s a happy bunny today.
Second-tier TLDs gain aftermarket traction
The average aftermarket selling price of domain names in second-tier TLDs is creeping up, according to the latest numbers from Sedo.
Sedo’s latest quarterly sales review shows that namespaces such as .biz, .info and .org are selling for far better money than they were a year ago.
In fact, the median selling price of .biz, .org, and .net domains is now higher than that of .com.
The price of .biz names, which only accounted for 1% of overall sales, has almost doubled in the last four quarters, up 97% at $537.
The .info namespace fared almost as well, recording a median price of $418, up 91% on the $219 recorded in the second quarter of 2009.
The long-established .org has also appreciated over the last 12 months. Its median price rose 45% to $550.
While there’s no doubt that .com is still where the high-end money is, the median price for a .com was only $510, a 24% increase over the same period.
Sedo has started reporting median prices because big one-off sales can have an impact on the mean averages it also reports.
Its full Q1 Domain Market Study report can be downloaded here.
Two-letter .info auctions get go-ahead
ICANN has approved Afilias’ request to auction off its reserve of one and two-letter .info domain names.
The company seems to be planning to allocate the names both at auction and through a request-for-proposals process that would see registrants promise to develop and market their .info sites.
Any big partnerships could provide a welcome profile boost to .info, which has been around for a decade but still only grows about as much in a year as .com does in a month.
While auctions could also bring a nice windfall to the company, Afilias can expect to come under pressure from certain trademark holders to keep their brands off the market.
Volkswagen’s lawyers apparently “threatened every action in the book” to keep vw.biz out of Neustar’s allocation process for two-letter .biz names last year.
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