When I was 7 years old I built a tree-fort in the crabapple tree on the vacant lot next to my house. My Dad nailed up an old wooden pallet as a floor.. then my friends from the neighborhood all pitched in to put up walls and finished it off. After a while I got aloof about "my tree fort" neglecting to give credit or share the place with my friends and they quickly repossessed the walls and furnishings to build a better fort in an adjacent tree. I learned a valuable lesson staring at my stripped pallet that day.
I see alot of ‘tree fort mentality’ going on in the GTLD business. In an effort to keep out investors, domainers, commercial registrants, cybersquatters and anyone they don’t like; many namespaces create fiefdoms that nobody wants to be a part of. They make renewal costs outrageous, regulations untenable and basically relegate their name-space to complete irrelevance. Take dot .aero or .museum. I don’t know anyone with a dot aero or who even cares about a dot .aero The aero namespace was created (yes) but it is nearly completely unused and not relevant to commerce. Nobody builds sites there, so nobody types-in the names.. nobody types-in the names so nobody builds sites there. Its a vicious cycle — exactly like the .com space only in complete reverse.
How much ICANN energy was exerted to create a namespace that doesn’t really increase the amount of vacant land to build on? It takes just as much energy to create a good namespace that’s open and free. They say there is more land than ever on the net, but with the brutal over-regulation in many namespaces like.eu, .aero and others, is there really more land? If you have 15 countries run like North Korea it doesn’t change anything. People still want to live in a free Country like the US. The US in my example is .com of course. I am sure Verisign was clicking its heels with glee when the last round of completely useless TLD’s was announced. "Another name space nobody will use… Good for us! We run the .com!".
How did we get to this reality? Some of it is steering by the existing registries to protect their turf. Some of it is opposition from TM holders who do not want to re-fight the TM battle against Cybersquatters they already beat in .com. To a smaller extent opposition comes from name-investors who rally around the TM argument as a straw-man for the real cause of protecting the value of their "domain diamonds"; by artificially limiting supply of good alternatives.
What about the little namespaces.. Why launch a namespace that nobody cares about? Don’t we all get into business to thrive? Some of that is just large scale ineptitude IMO. People register worthless domain names every day, thinking they are making a brilliant decision during the moment they press the ‘buy’ button. Some of the little registry operators are making the same error in judgment on a larger scale. They wrongly believe that people will buy into their over-regulated world because "only they are .aero" Wouldn’t every pilot want one? Clearly not. Other little registry operators are more sinister. They charge $100′s or thousands per year for a single registration. Why do that? Because they know that some percentage of trademark holders will pay anything to protect their brand. Its a nice little protection racket. Charge $1000 a year (take it or leave it) and some trademark owners will knuckle under and pay. Find 1000 suckers and you’ve got 1mm per year in easy cash-flow. I could imagine a smart law firm trying to take the more brazen US based registries to task for this under the RICO statute.
Ultimately my point with this post is to suggest that it would be great if ICANN permitted a viable open alternative to .com to rise and if IP interests found a way to accept that they may have some IP challenges; but that it would be good for the Internet as a whole. Name investors and Verisign would find that .com still has clout (888 numbers came after 800 numbers and 800 is still king), but the specter of a viable alternative like .Web would make passing registry price increases in .COM more challenging.
I think of the extra extensions similar to what the phone company did down in Florida when I lived there. There was a threat of area code extensions a few years ago so they redid the format of how you had to dial out. Instead of dialing seven numbers, they made it where you had to dial ten (area code plus local number).
I see new extensions as an attempt by ICANN to ensure “good” domains don’t “run out”, while attempting to get the public to recognize and accept other extensions as possibilities. While it may seem like there is an infinite number of .com extensions, there is a finite number of “good” .com extensions. As domain investors, we already see this by not registering or buying domains such as wildcat-perfumeisgood.com versus a generic.
This is just my opinion of why they push out so many unusable domain extensions.
If you look at it another way, once the public does accept a new extension as valuable and recognizable, this puts more money into ICANN’s pocket as well as registrars.
What if there were no other extensions other than .com? Wouldn’t the value of .coms rise over time as more valuable names because more scarce? While the domain value would rise, renewal fees wouldn’t, putting less money into ICANN’s pocket while the value of domains rose. Could this be their thinking?
***** I want new extensions.. I just want ICANN to add some good ones that are not overly regulated.. that people anywhere are permitted to buy at a reasonable price and without undue restriction. A space with the same historical rules as dot com.. that could challenge .com
Frank,
I completely agree there are far too many useless TLDs being created.
What are your thoughts on .mobi? The way I see it .mobi will be extinct before it ever truely reaches end user popularity. The Apple iPhone and many other mobile devices can and will be able to view the internet in its standard format, this will be the norm in the near future, so what is the use of haveing seperate .mobi domains?
.Mobi prices appear to have bubbled extremely fast thanks to some of the biggest players in the industry. Flowers.mobi… come on, let’s be realistic here. .Mobi’s are still hot, but will they sucessfully reach outside of the realms of domain speculation… I’m not so sure they will.
You are a very clever person Mr.(or Ms.) Ocean,
I look at .mobi and see nothing more than a sales organization. Nothing more. If a .mobi resolves in a mini browser so will the .com If the .com won’t resolve, the browser is doomed to failure. That was .mobi’s schtick: “The browser will recognize the URL and serve a mobile device sized page” or something along that vein. Any techie will tell you that the user agent does the same thing.. browser reads you as coming in on a mobile device user agent, then serves you the mini browser size window. All the talk about .mobi are just that .. salesmen talking. Incidentally I have heard several folks I know and respect comment on the fact that alot of the auction bidding relating to these names is staged (you buy for a dollar and i’ll give you 95 cents back or an affiliate discount of something). For those that remember.. some of that type of front-running went on in the .cc tld back in the day. Who talks about .cc extension today aside from the bankrupt and the insane? But they were once supposedly a viable alternative to .com names. The smart money runs from extensions like these IMO.. but JMO.
As an ex web developer, .mobi is pretty useless. You guys are both correct. There is nothing more .mobi can offer cell phones and PDAs.
Your blog has become a “must read” before I start each day (thank you). A further comment on the discussions regarding other newly minted TLDs like .mobi. My 16 year old daughter, a totally wired-in, wired-up,iPod and cellphone clutching 16 year old looked at me as I was talking about whether to register a couple of .mobi domains. “What’s a .mobi?” she asked. End of conversation, and no .mobis registered either!
I missed this article when it was published. Brilliant. This says it all.
Ever heard the expression “give me a dollar and a dream.” Namesellers are dreamsellers. And domains are a salesman’s dream.
Its because dreams are easy to sell when the chances of realizing them get slimmer. Hence when the lottery jackpot gets higher, and the evening news shows lines everywhere, more tickets are sold and one in a million becomes one in 400 million. The only thing that increases is the amount of money you loose from the ability to truly realize your dreams.
I always think it’s ironic to see the lottery ads on the highway that claim $70 billion raised for education when that money was made from stupidy.
And as long as there are the ones in a million like Rick, Sahar and you as proof of possibility, domain dreams will never die.
What they don’t realize is that in your cases success didn’t come from luck, it came from understanding.
***FS*** Very nice of you to say Owen.. thanks for the note.