Domain Names

ICANN to Speed Up Internationalized Domain Name Development

Friday, November 16th, 2007 | Domain Names | No Comments

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will speed development of country-coded top-level domains and local-language scripting, the group announced Wednesday at the Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro.

ICANN, the worldwide nonprofit organization that regulates the Internet’s domain name system, or DNS, has launched its campaign to provide internationalized country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs–those that don’t use Latin characters–as soon as possible with the help of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization, an ICANN policy development body for ccTLD issues.

“A lot of hard work has been done on IDNs (internationalized domain names) and there is a technical evaluation of their impact…going on as we speak,” ccNSO Chairman Chris Disspain said in a statement.

“The next step is to develop the policies that will see the creation of new top-level domains in characters from the languages of the world,” Disspain said.

ICANN’s board approved the establishment of an IDN working group at a meeting in Los Angeles earlier this month.

“The goal behind the fast-track process is to find a way to represent territory identifications in their local languages in operation as ccTLDs as quickly as possible,” said Disspain.

Disspain went on to say that the immediate goal in the process is to establish ccTLDs in the “areas of highest need” first, and to avoid any unnecessary impositions on the long-term plans for the full implementation of IDNs.

“This fast-track process will really be driven by those who want to take part and get their name in their language on their Internet in their country,” Disspain said.

The announcement comes less than a month after ICANN elected New Zealand lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush as its new chairman, replacing Internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

Dot.Com prices go up October 15th, Verisign n registries raising rates

Saturday, October 13th, 2007 | Domain Names | 1 Comment

DotCom prices go up October 15th. Verisign and other registries will be raising rates for registrars on that date. The top-level domains being effected are .com, .net, .org, .info .biz, .us and .name. On Monday, most registrars will be directly passing that cost on to their customers. If you own over 100 domains, you can save over $100 by renewing earlier than your auto-renewal date. If you own over 100,000 domains, you can save, well, a lot of money. Most big portfolio owners pay for domains one year at a time. If a domain expires in 30 or 60 days, most registrars will renew it for their customer if they have selected the auto-renew function. The registrar will bill the same credit card that is on-file.

eNom has already announced their price increases for October 15th. From what I hear, most registrars that have expensive domains like Dotster will not be increasing their rates. If a domain is $15 retail, it most likely will stay $15. However Dotster’s other brand, MyDomain.com, that has its lowest rate at $6.62 for over 100 domains will raise its rates. In short, if consumers have a lot of domains, they should renew now.

eNom Pricing Tiers Old Domain Pricing Tier New Domain Pricing Tier
PREMIER $6.95/year $7.45/year
VOLUME $7.95/year $8.45/year
BASIC $8.95/year $9.45/year
ALTERNATIVE $9.95/year $10.45/year
RETAIL $29.95 /year $29.95 /year (no change)

http://www.enom.com/price-notification.asp

If you have a link to a registrar’s price increase page, please add it in the comments below and I will add it to the post. I have not been able to find price increase notifications very easily on many registrar websites.

UPDATE: The old price for DotCom to a registrar was $6.20 ($6.00 with Verisign+ $0.20 to ICANN). Now the price is $6.62 ($6.42 to Verisign + $0.20 to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)).

Domain Fraudster Faces 20 Years In Jail

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 | Domain Names, Internet Marketing | 1 Comment

A man in Nevada is facing a possible 20 years in jail after trying to defraud people out of their domain names. David Scali pleaded guilty in court to a charge of mail fraud after being caught out in the scam.

Scali registered an email under a false name and pretended to be an intellectual property lawyer, threatening $100,000 lawsuits unless domain name holders signed over their property within 48 hours.

The man targeted websites with similar names to popular sites. When internet users mistype URLs the traffic these sites generate can be used to sell advertising on the misspelt sites, a practice known as domain-squatting or typo-squatting.

http://www.vnu.co.uk/vnunet/news/2198454/cybersquatter-faces-twenty

Netscape Relocates Social Site to New Domain

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 | Domain Names, Internet News | No Comments

Netscape Relocates Social Site to New Domain
Netscape.com will return to original news format

The Netscape social news experience that you are currently using today will be migrated and revealed soon at http://www.propeller.com/. We’re working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination.
It is important to us that you feel empowered to choose how you want to consume your news and participate in the community. As we mentioned in a recent post, the Netscape.com site will soon be redirected to the new Netscape portal, a more traditional and editorially-driven news experience. It’s already live, so you can check it out now if you haven’t already. You’ll notice some elements of our social news site there in short order, so that it will be easy for you to go back and forth and engage in each if you like.

http://blog.netscape.com/2007/09/11/social-news-update/

Kids Site Sold for $350 Million USD by Disney

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 | Domain Names, Internet Marketing, Internet News | No Comments

Racing to solidify its dominant position in children’s entertainment on the Internet, the Walt Disney Company said Wednesday that it had acquired a subscription Web site aimed at preteenagers, Club Penguin, in a deal that could total $700 million.

Disney said it would pay $350 million for Club Penguin, a virtual community that has soared in popularity since its founding in late 2005. More than 700,000 users now pay $5.95 a month to customize penguin characters and then chat and play games with other “penguins.”
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Business.com Gets Big Payday $345 million

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 | Domain Names, Internet News | No Comments

The Web’s original high-price domain name has been sold again — for another lofty price.

Telephone-directory company R.H. Donnelley Corp. clinched a deal for Web-based marketing directory Business.com Inc. for $345 million, Donnelley said Thursday.

Business.com was founded by entrepreneurs Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton in 1999. The two were widely mocked for lavishing $7.5 million on a single Internet domain name — business.com — at the …..

Full Story …..

ICANN To Introduce New TLDs By Mid 2008

Sunday, July 15th, 2007 | Domain Names, Internet News | No Comments

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the Internet’s domain-name address system, said on Friday it was on track to allow an expanded number of domain names next year.

ICANN officials, wrapping up a week-long meeting in Puerto Rico, said their goal was to have in place by next year a permanent process to allow for new, generic top-level domain names, as well as to begin “internationalizing” domain names.
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Top-level domain names, or TLDs, refer to Internet name suffixes, such as the ubiquitous .com, .net and .org, among others. There are more than 200 TLDs, which also include the two-character country codes used by Web sites.

“With the progress we’ve made is San Juan, we’re on track for the new applications and approvals policy to be ready for the start of 2008 and the introduction of new TLDs by mid-year,” said Dr. Paul Twomey, president and chief executive of ICANN.

The California-based non-profit organization oversaw two previous extensions of Internet space: the addition of seven TLDS, including .info and .name in 2000, and the addition of another six starting in 2004.

It recently denied a petition to include .xxx as a TLD to be used for pornographic Web sites.

Current plans call for a quick approval process for suffix names that raise no objections. More controversial applications would require additional review.

The group is also working to expand the number of characters that can be used to create Internet addresses, currently limited to the 26 Roman characters, 10 numerals and the hyphen. This would allow the use of Arabic, Chinese and a multitude of other characters to be used in domain names.

While foreign characters can sometimes be used as a part of an Internet address, the three-letter suffixes are confined to Roman characters.

There are technical and policy challenges the group is working on to begin the internationalization process, said Dr. Vint Cerf, ICANN chairman.

For example, many foreign-language characters look exactly alike, so the group will have to establish rules to determine who gets to use such characters. Other characters might resemble computer software code and could impair functioning.
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“The important thing is that whatever you call a domain name, it works exactly the same anywhere in the world,” Cerf said.

Twomey said live tests on international domain names would take place in November.

ICANN also held discussions to improve its oversight of registrars, private companies which enter agreements with ICANN to sell domain names.

Currently, ICANN can only eliminate an agreement with a registrar if it finds it has incurred violations. It wants to modify its agreement structure to allow for a greater array of sanctions.

The issue has taken on urgency since the group recently had to strip RegisterFly of its accreditation due to poor service, which impacted thousands of its users.

Some 1,000 participants from more than 115 countries participated in the San Juan meeting, the second of the group’s three public meetings this year. The next takes place in Los Angeles in November.

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