Namecheap has given away 500,000 free .me domains

A project started in 2014 has seen Namecheap give away 500,000 .me domains to university students in the Anglophone world.

The offer, started in 2014 at nc.me, is for the first year’s registration and is for students to create “online portfolios, resumes, blogs and other personal websites”.

Registrants authenticate themselves by having email addresses associated with universities, such as .edu in the US. Institutions in the UK and Australia are also supported.

Not all of the names registered over the last nine years are still registered, according to a spokesperson, but 500,000 would be a sizable chunk of .me’s total domains under management.

The registry, Domen, does not regularly publish its reg numbers but it hadn’t yet crossed the one million mark as of 2018, according to its web site.

The Namecheap spokesperson said that the registry provide the first-year regs for free under the partnership.

doMEn uses comedy compo to plug .me domains

doMEN, the .me registry, is marketing .me domain names with a series of comedy videos, presented in the form of a knockout competition and sweepstake.
The three-week “Comedy Cagematch” will see 30-second videos featuring 16 comedians being voted on by internet users. Voting gets you the chance to win a $500 camera.
The campaign has been put together by comedy-focused ad agency RadioFace, which has already produced this video featuring stand-up TJ Miller.

Apparently, if you have a .com you also have to use words like “problopportunity” (which I thought was pretty funny).
The promotion starts on Register.me from October 8. Only Americans and Canadians can enter the sweepstakes.

.me beating .co in start-ups?

The .co top-level domain may have more registrations, but more tech start-ups are opting for .me domain names, according to an informal study.
Doctoral student Thomas Park compiled a list of 1,000 start-ups added to TechCrunch’s CrunchBase database last year and found that entrepreneurs chose .co 1% of the time, versus 1.7% for .me.
As caveats, the difference between the two TLDs only works out to seven companies and .me, which launched in 2008, does of course have a two-year head start over .co.
I’m also guessing that CrunchBase has an English-language bias, which could skew the results. While .co has meaning in more countries it lacks the call-to-action punch of .me in English.
Nevertheless, I think the results are interesting because .CO Internet heavily targets start-ups in its marketing and currently has twice as many domains under management (over 1.1 million) as doMEn, the Afilias/Go Daddy joint-venture .me registry.
Park’s results show that .me had a 0.50% share in 2010 and a 0.80% share in 2009 while .co managed to get one company (0.10%) on the list during the half of 2010 it was live.
The survey found that .com is the runaway first choice for entrepreneurs, with about 85% of the start-up market, but you knew that already.

Will the internet get two new ccTLDs (and lose one)?

One country dropped off the map on Sunday, and two new countries were created. So does this mean we’re going to get two new country-code top-level domains?
The islands of Curacao and St. Maarten have reportedly become autonomous countries, after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles, a collection of former Dutch colonies off north-east coast of Venezuela.
The reorganization sees a number of other islands join the Netherlands as municipalities, while Curacao and St. Maarten become countries in the own right, albeit still tied politically tied to the motherland.
It seems quite possible that these two islands will now get their own ccTLDs, for two reasons.
First, both states are now reportedly as autonomous as fellow former Dutch Antilles territory Aruba, if not more so. Aruba acquired this status in 1986 and had .aw delegated to it by IANA in 1996.
Second, St Maarten shares a landmass with St Martin, a former French colony. The French northern side of the island is already entitled to its own ccTLD, .mf, although the domain has never been delegated.
ICANN/IANA does not make the call on what is and isn’t considered a nation for ccTLD purposes. Rather, it defers to the International Standards Organization, and a list of strings called ISO 3166-2.
The ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency in turn defers to the UN’s Statistics Division and its “Countries or areas, codes and abbreviations” list, which can be found here.
How long a new ccTLD delegation takes can vary wildly.
Montenegro, for example, declared its independence on June 3, 2006. It was added to the ISO 3166 list on September 26 that year, applied for a ccTLD on December 24, and received its delegation of .me following an ICANN board vote on September 11, 2007.
Finland’s Aland Islands got .ax less than six months after applying in 2006. North Korea, by contrast, received .kp on the same day as Montenegro got .me, but had first applied in 2004.
IANA treats the deletion of a ccTLD much more cautiously, due to the fact that some TLDs could have many second-level registrations already.
The removal of the former Yugoslavian domain, .yu, was subject to a three-year transition process under the supervision of the new .rs registry.
The Dutch Antilles has its own ccTLD, .an, which is in use and delegated to University of The Netherlands Antilles, based in Curacao.
Will we see a gradual phasing-out of .an, in favor of two new ccTLDs?

Go Daddy launches paid YouTube clone

Go Daddy has opened the doors of Video.me, a video-hosting service with a difference.
The difference is you have to pay for it.
The company seems to be banking on the idea that users will be happy to hand over $2 per month, rather than use YouTube for free, because Video.me has simpler password protection.
“People want privacy online, it’s obvious from the all of the recent news,” chief executive Bob Parsons said in a press release. “YouTube has been the place for mass-consumption videos, but for sharing more personal items, it’s way too complicated.”
Most of the recent news about online privacy has been focused on Facebook. I don’t think I’ve seen many people complaining about YouTube.
Still, at the very least the service is a high-profile use of a .me domains, which could help Go Daddy as a partner in Domen, the Montenegro-based .me registry.

UDRP claim pits .me against .me.uk

The owner of GuestList.me.uk has filed a UDRP claim against the registrant of GuestList.me.
As far as I can tell, this is the first UDRP case to directly pit a company built on a .me.uk brand against the registrant of the .me equivalent.
GuestList.me.uk is a London, UK-based nightclub promotions site that has been using its domain since 2003.
GuestList.me, which does not currently resolve, was registered through LCM.com’s privacy service on July 18, 2008, during the first 24 hours of .me general availability.
Given that LCM is a UK-based registrar, it seems plausible that GuestList.me’s registrant is also British.
It will be interesting to see which way this decision goes. There’s plenty of opportunity for precedent.