According to an article in the Wall Street Journal many job-site .com operators say they are worried how the .Jobs extension “will affect their already crowded and distressed sector of the economy”.
The Journal quotes Eric Shannon, who operates DiversityJobs.com and other niche job sites as saying “he’s worried about competitors.”
“I feel threatened,” Mr. Shannon points out that if someone were to buy the rights to diversity.jobs, they could essentially create a duplicate of his business, which has already seen revenues shrink in half since the start of the recession.
The story is by subscription only so that’s all you get on this one, but this story its only the first of many such stories we will be reading as hundreds of new extensions will be coming in 2012 threatening lot of businesses in almost every sector.
Welcome to the world of ICANN.
There has to be serious concerns where a gTLD, even a sponsored gTLD, can be used by a contracted party to secure advantage over other entities looking to compete in the same market place.
What happens if Microsoft secures .search? I’m sure they will be happy to sell google.search to Google if they can point video.search images.search and news.search to Bing
why?
they must only buy the new domains as many .com owners have done with .co
@ Black Planet. What happens if .jobs does not want to sell them their name? and say puts up their own auto generated board for example? Having a single entity owning a TLD from within the industry is way way different from having a company like Afilias or VeriSign selling through competing registrars.
The problems will be exasperated too if there are no price caps for new gTLDs
Almost every industry is going to face this issue when the new gTLD’s get released in 2012.
The adult industry is going to face this next year when .XXX roll out
I would worry more about Jobs.com or Hotels.com than “.jobs” or “.hotels”.
Diversity.Jobs.com
Programming.Jobs.com
Government.Jobs.com
Chicago.Hotels.com
Baltimore.Hotels.com
Miami.Hotels.com
Jobs.com and hotels.com have existed for a long time, .JOBS is first coming.
At the moment a whole series of totally separate entities can equitably compete in the second level hotels.com hotels.info hotels.net hotels.de etc. Allowing .web and .site to compete is totally different from allowing one company to control .hotels.
Generic gTLDs like .hotels are an absolute minefield for ICANN. If one of the big players such as Intercontinental, Wyndham or Best Western etc. acquire the IP rights to .hotels (or the company which is awarded .hotels), they have sufficient market presence to use it to brand in all the major cities as each have over 4000 hotels. That’s London.hotels , Paris.hotels, NewYork.hotels once their competitors realize what they have been granted they are not going to be very happy, in much the same way as if their competitors had been granted a trademark for a category defining generic term like “hotels”
Anyone willing to start a business on a second-rate domain like .jobs should be of no concern. Many of us could launch a nice Job Board right now for less than $50. He is likely worried that he will get pushed down on his long-tail search results. Those pages happen to have no real content, so his concern is a valid one.
It is a valid point about confusion and traffic diversion from the .com
(.net or .org) to the new gtld domain.
But, what if an operation like Enom or DomainSponsor or Trafficz or
Microsoft secured a gtld like .jobs – .hotels – .shopping, they would
know which domains received dns inquiries or traffic and would use
that data mining to reg that domain or similar domain for themselves.
Also there is no obligation that any new gTLD ever release any domains.
So a company could acquire the rights to say .Hotel and keep the extension for themselves setting up extensions like NewYork.Hotels for every major city around the world.
Selling domains is optional under the ICANN rules for new gTLD sponsors
You might just have a bad link, you can read the full story at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703649004575437422759483444.html
“What happens if .jobs does not want to sell them their name? and say puts up their own auto generated board for example?”
well, I think, that (e.g.) mo ns ter. co m will easily have its mo ns ter.jo bs domain assigned, also if bought by others before, exactly as happens today with all domains disputes
.
“What happens if .jobs does not want to sell them their name? and say puts up their own auto generated board for example?”
“What happens if .jobs does not want to sell them their name? and say puts up their own auto generated board for example?”
well, I think, that (e.g.) monster will easily have its .jobs domain assigned, also if bought by others before, exactly as happens today with all domains disputes
.
Realized now I was contradicting myself 😛 Started browsing his website halfway through the comment.
sorry for the duplicated comment but the blog’s filter doesn’t accept the .com at the end of “monster”
It’s hard to make a compelling argument out of this.
All throughout history, people have been opposed to whatever generated competition for their existing operations or revenue makers. The prevailing philosophy is that competition = good,- the creative-destruction of the free markets.
Obviously, speculative domainers are going to hate this and like any other issue or matter, there’s some anecdote out there on the margins that we can cite as to why this change is a bad idea, but if you step outside our own little bubble and ask this same question, the answer is very, very different.
Obviously, speculative domainers are going to hate this and like any other issue or matter, there’s some anecdote out there on the margins that we can cite as to why this change is a bad idea, but if you step outside our own little bubble and ask this same question, the answer is very, very different.
Wasn’t .jobs was setup to be run by an entity providing a service to the worldwide jobs community?
Is the entity now running .jobs now being permitted to compete directly against the same community whose support it elicited and required for its original application?
There’s competition and there’s the appearance of competition through the creation of a series of very expensive monopoly positions granted in perpetuity. There are a myriad of better ways to create competition at registry level if that is was ICANN’s intention.
This isn’t an “edge issue” It’s a fundamental flaw in the whole new gTLD process these inequities have the potential to be replicated again and again in every industry. Most people won’t realize they have been disadvantaged until after the fact, but that doesn’t mean ICANN doesn’t have a duty to protect them.
Is this not what is happening to some degree with .Co and .XXX when (if) it is released?
This why Frank Schillings words about .Com are as true today as when it was spoken yesterday.
.Com is your surest investment.
Still the irony is not lost on me that someone wants to release JOBS extension in the midst of the highest unemployment rate this country has experienced since the Great Depression.
“Wasn’t .jobs was setup to be run by an entity providing a service to the worldwide jobs community? ”
No. .Jobs was set up to serve companies looking to hire people. This new initiative is consistent with that mission.
.Jobs was not intended to serve job hiring intermediaries for employers.
Tom Barrett
EnCirca
I can see this striking the same amount of terror that dotTravel did to the travel industry 🙂
LS Morgan I think you have the right ideas, only that you are rowing in the opposite direction. From the article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703649004575437422759483444.html we read in the second paragraph:
“But the mostly small businesses that run job sites ending in dot-com say they worry how the development will affect their already crowded and distressed sector of the economy.”
So that competition of small businesses that collectively and involuntarily create market forces to drive the free market economy towards what’s favourable for end users,… is already there.
If it’s up to ICANN to decide when and how to shake all the online economy, this in essence removes power from ALL existing domain owners to themselves. This stuff of new gTLDs almost makes the Internet up to today look as if it all had been a bad joke. It’s very disrespectful towards all the existing Internet community that such fundamental decissions are taken unilaterally.
If ICANN really wants to make good for the Internet as a whole, why don’t they begin with something more obvious and much less polemical?!! For example, a dotcom domain costs $10 to renew and prices tend to go up, while each domain could cost Verisign about $0.50 to maintain and it’s prices go down as hardware gets more cheap! Apart from this one company, correcting this unjustified expense in existing TLDs would benefict ALL Internet content-providers…
Let’s one up these guy’s trying to launch .Jobs, let’s launch .Unemployed or .Jobless
seems more fitting for these times of economic uncertainty.
I can’t figure out why hand.jobs was on “registry reserve” for a while, but then a few months ago it was delegated to a registrar who does not provide WHOIS.
I don’t think deregulation is going to do a lot for the extension personally. What is the compelling reason for companies to embrace it over *****jobs.countrycode or *******jobs.com. It doesn’t have the obvious fit of .xxx, there is no really strong reason to use .jobs.
Maybe having myriad tlds will strengthen *search* in addition to drawing contrast beneficial to original, trusted, familiar tlds like com. With an endless sea of semantically similar labels with varied tld components, how does a user find what she’s looking for, simply based on human friendly address labels? Maybe the “content” made available from a server at a given address will prove more important than the name identifier used for that address. In the short term, the registry and registrar businesses benefit from new tlds, irrespective of whether other parties purchasing the names or using them benefit. The dispute resolution system might also benefit as their will be more disputes over trademarks.
@ Tom
No. .Jobs was set up to serve companies looking to hire people. This new initiative is consistent with that mission. .Jobs was not intended to serve job hiring intermediaries for employers.
That’s interesting because the charter for .jobs states “The .JOBS TLD will be established to serve the needs of the international human resource management community (the “Community”).”
Especially as qualifying membership of the Sponsoring organization SHRM is an individual membership organization; it has no corporate or institutional memberships.”
During the application for .jobs concerns were raised about “the broad nature of the employment category the global jobs and careers market was well served by existing search capabilities and that the application as presented would not add significant new value to the name space.”
At the time Employ Media was very keen to stress the relationship between “company name” + “.jobs” and how that particular relationship between the two formed a very distinct community.
Wasn’t it this definition of community that helped .jobs to meet the sponsored criteria?
Do you think .jobs would have been able to meet the original criteria with the recently implemented changes?
Leave it to Mr. Berryhill to pick out the most valuable .Jobs domain in existence.
why not start a petition to stop the TLDs’ proliferation?
anyway… could Steve buy his .Jobs domain? and… to do what? …a personal super website, or… a new Apple business?
I think it is not a problem. A competition in any shape or form works on users. This problem will assist development of sites.
I think it is not a problem. A competition in any shape or form works on users. This problem will assist development of sites.
Competition is generally recognized as a good thing, however allowing contracted parties to leverage or negotiate themselves advantage over their competitors simply because of their commercial relationship with the market provider can give rise for concern.
Also its the nature of the competition rather than the intensity that is often more important for a thriving marketplace.