TLD Registry Ltd is thrilled to announce that today the Pre-Delegation Testing (PDT) for Dot Chinese Online (.在线) & Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) will begin. This marks a substantive step towards our go-live plans, which we estimate will take place early next year. PDT, an ICANN requirement for all New gTLDS, is a series of …
“Dotless” TLDs Within the evaluation process there have evidently been a number of proposals that propose relatively novel use of these top level DNS labels, and the one I’d like to look at here is that of the so-called “dotless” domains proposed for the DNS root zone. It’s as if I had decided to revive …
It’s late in the new gTLD day and the program looks to be inching ever closer to the finish line. Yet last minute hiccups seem to be a recurring theme for this ambitious project to expand the Internet namespace far beyond the 300 odd active TLDs in existence today (counting generics and country codes). A …
Back on February 4, 2013, I wrote a CircleID post entitled, ‘How the registrar Cash Flow Model Could Collapse with New ICANN gTLDs.’ My key point back then was this: new gTLD applicants need to be mindful of how the cash flow policies of their registry (and of their back-end service provider) could impact whether …
Yesterday, a decision on a string confusion objection was reached by a dispute resolution provider that resulted in a scenario that ICANN and the Applicant Guidebook had not addressed — conflicting opinions have been rendered by expert panelists ruling on the exact same pair of strings. One of our applications now hangs in the balance. …
Temporarily freezes move that could have led to global corporates monopolising the WWW by privatising domains like .beauty or .book The Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN) has put on hold a controversial decision to allot closed generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) to applicants. Governments and activists had feared that allotting such …
This week, on a cruise ship navigating Russia’s Neva river, around 250 domain registrars and resellers are gathered for the RU-CENTER annual domain conference. RU-CENTER is the largest Russian registrar in a market that is dominated by three companies. RU-CENTER and competitor Reg.Ru both manage around 28% of domains registered in the country’s national suffix …
It’s safe to say that with just a week to go before ICANN intended to sign the first contract for a new gTLD, the last thing anyone wanted was a 12-page document from the world’s governments with 16 new “safeguards”, six of which it wants to see applied to every new extension. But what …
The total number of registered domain names passed 250 million in the last quarter of 2012, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief. More than 6 million domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 252 million worldwide. The basic .com domains, of course, make up the majority …
When the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) released the list of the potential new generic top level domains (gTLDs), it seemed that .app was the one to watch: no less than 13 organisations applied to manage the domain. But .africa is also causing some trouble, as the two organisations that applied for …