[menog] .asia landrush

[jim.mercer at viszo.com]

hello.

in my past life, i was on the board of directors for the .ca registry and sat through the .info and .xxx debacles, as well as dealing with the speculators and IP issues within the .ca namespace.

the "landrush" in my opinion is largely an inducement to increase the number of domains sold.

from the perspective of a company, you could be concerned about someone getting "your" domain, but in truth it does not need to be of huge concern.  many people do not find out about the pre-registration process for new TLD's until its too late.

if you already have the domains you need for your company purposes, there really isn't a need to be run out and get "mycompany.newTLD" every time ICANN bends to lobbyists and creates a new continent in the namespace.

with every new TLD, there will be a campaign of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) to cause you to feel that you must register it, or lose some tangible value.

for 99% of the domain users out there, a conflict in the namespace is of no matter, and if the person that gets "mycompany.newTLD" puts up content that conflicts with your business, there are other legal avenues to persue.

again, for 99% of the namespace conflicts, the domain will likely be picked up by a speculator who is only interested in buying the domain for $10 and selling it to you for $10,000.  they will make the domain live with some kinda pseudo-search page so they can make a few google-ads dollars on it, but it is highly unlikely they will put any kind of offensive or competitive content on it.

in my opinion, the best way to combat the domain speculators is not to play their game.  don't buy the domain from them unless you really want/need it for your intellectual property purposes.

with the current project i'm involved with, some previous "consultant" recommended, and management followed, advice to register "viszo..." for approximately 50 TLD's. the annual cost of this was in excess of $3,000 and included some rather obscure country ccTLD's in which we would be unlikely to operate, as well as the completely bogus viszo.USA.COM and viszo.UK.com.  i've since recommended, and management followed, advice that we simply not renew the extraneous domains and just keep the ones that are pertinent (.com/net/org and a few others).  because they had already been registered, the expired domains were snapped up by speculators, but as yet i've not seen anything that would impair our business.

i registered reptiles.org in 1991 as a place to house my personal stuff. even though i easily could have registered reptiles.com and reptiles.net at the time (back then, at no cost), i didn't feel the need to be greedy.

when i last looked a few years ago, reptiles.com and reptiles.net were both held by speculators, asking $15,000 and $10,000 respectively.

when i look now, i see that reptiles.com has apparently been sold and has generic content, and reptiles.net is still unused.

see reptiles.info for an example of a speculator site.

for vanity purposes, i also have reptiles.ca, reptiles.ae and reptiles.pn.

to me, the bigger issue with the landrush is not the speculators, but the scammers.

i have seen numerous scams related to .asia (as i had with .info and .biz, which are largely unused except by speculators in my view).

i received many "important" emails stating that suchandsuch.asia was about to be registered by some competitor, and that as a safety measure i should "click here" to register it before hand, as well as a bunch of other "mycompany...." domains in order to protect my name.

if you "click here" it charges an enormous fee to transfer your domains to some domain registrar, who would then proceed to charge double or triple the normal fees for renewing your domain each year.

just my perspective, hope it helps.
 
--
Jim Mercer
Network Architect
VISZO Project
SAB Communications
+971 55 410 5633




> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [menog] .asia landrush
> From: Hashim Hilal <hhilal at alkhorayef.com>
> Date: Tue, February 26, 2008 9:38 pm
> To: menog at menog.net
> 
> Can someone better address the TLD landrush?
> 
> "We are ready for something big. All of our people and systems are in place and we look forward to the commencement of the .asia landrush" (DotAsia Orginization) 
> 
> BBC says .asia will go live March and also adds 
> 
>       Once it starts, there's far less protection for companies' trademarks and its open season on the .asia domain name for cybersquatters, online speculators and competitors.
> 
> Can our ICANN fellow compadres give insight into TLD (.me .asia etc etc) & how can our companies not get under the stampede for such landrush. 
> 
> Best Regards,
> Hashim
> 
> IPv6 TF ME
> MENOG
> 
> Business Analyst
> Alkhorayef Group of Companies
> Saudi Arabia