Not to be outdone by New York City, London is set to follow its transatlantic cousin in getting its very own domain name. ICANN, regulator of all things domain related, today gave the British capital the go-ahead to offer .london addresses to "businesses, organisations and individuals". While it gives Londoners the chance to show a bit of hometown love, the domain has already attracted the attention of "tens of thousands of businesses," which will each do their bit to help to boost London's online identity. Like the city's house prices, expect to pay a little extra to secure your own little piece of .london when registration opens in Spring 2014.
Filed under: Internet
Via: GigaOm
Source: London and Partners, MyDotLondon
We'd like to imagine that somewhere in Mountain View, a group of high-level tech execs are giving ICANN the stink eye. After all, the organization has recently passed a resolution that prohibits dotless domains, effectively squashing Google's dreams to own and operate http://search. This development follows a study ICANN published a few days ago, detailing how hard it'll be to mitigate security and stability risks that could come with the unusual domains. Google had big plans to turn http://search into a service where users could choose among a number of search websites that registered to be a part of it. Now that the one-word wonder is no longer an option for Page and Co., the company has to make do with .search (with a dot), assuming its bidding spree for a pile of gTLDs pays off.
Source: Domain Name Wire, Domain Incite
After spending over a year thumbing through applications, ICANN has inked agreements for establishing the first new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Those that made the cut this round were the Arabic word for web or network (.شبكة), game in Chinese (.游戏), and the Russian for online (.онлайн), as well as website (.сайт) -- as ICANN notes, these gTLDs will be the first to use non-Latin characters. Also coming out of the ICANN47 meeting for internet overlords is a bit of bad news for Amazon. A committee recommended that the retailer should not be given control of the .amazon domain, likely due to confusion the suffix could create with the Amazon region in South America. ICANN may see fit to go against the recommendation, but if Amazon's history with objectionable applications is anything to go by, it's looking like yet another $185,000 down the drain.
Via: The Verge
Source: ICANN, Wall Street Journal
Publishers represented by the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers have filed objections to Amazon's pursuit of new generic top-level domains ".book," ".author" and ".read." While some of those gTLDs have already come under fire from entire countries, the influential book groups told gatekeeper ICANN that "placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive," adding that it would allow "already dominant, well-capitalized companies" to abuse their market power. ICANN plans to assign rights to organizations or companies to manage domain suffixes like the current ".com" or ".org" and firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have sought names like ".app" and "movie," often in competition with each other. Competitor Barnes & Noble filed its own protest, saying that Amazon "would use control of these TLDs to stifle competition in the bookselling and publishing industries." If such protests are persuasive enough, companies could lose not only the domain name in question, but 20 percent of the $185,000 application fee -- admittedly pocket change for outfits like Amazon.
Filed under: Amazon
Via: WSJ (subscription)
The bidding process for custom top-level domains led to many candidates, but there can only be one that ICANN considers first. Which one gets the honor? Thanks to a semi-random draw, it's .天主教, or "Catholic" in Chinese -- a domain registered by the Catholic church's Pontifical Council for Social Communication. The position could give the church one of the first active custom TLDs in 2013, ahead of Amazon, VeriSign and others that were among the frontrunners in a 1,930-domain pack. There's no guarantees that the church or any of the other early bidders will be accepted when there's substantial dispute over who, if anyone, should own many of the given domains. Knowing who goes through ICANN's scrutiny, due early next year, may still prepare us for a changed internet landscape.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Reuters
Source: ICANN
In many ways, VeriSign has been one of the internet's true arbiters. It's ICANN's official registry operator for .com domains, which lets it determine how (and how much) we pay to get a particularly coveted address. As we're learning, the US Department of Commerce is only comfortable with that state of affairs to a certain point. It just approved a deal renewal that will let VeriSign watch over .com between December 1st this year and November 30th, 2018, but it's requiring that the company drop a previous right to hike registration prices as many as four times, at up to 7 percent, over the length of the term. The current $7.85 price will last unless VeriSign either faces exceptional circumstances or can prove that the market is healthy enough to lift the ceiling. We're sure the business isn't happy when the DOC move dictates how much money it can make, but compulsive domain hunters will enjoy the extra dollars in their pockets.
Filed under: Internet
Source: The Next Web