Frank Schilling one of the largest private domain name portfolio owners in the world through Name Administration, is getting into the new gTLD space, as a registry, making application for some new gTLD’s and today officially launched his new gTLD company called Uniregistry
“We are building the next wave of destinations for businesses to exist on the Internet.”
“What happens when you take a team of experts, at the top of the naming industry, and unite them behind a single, high-minded purpose? You get the most service-based and holistic approach to registry operations that the industry has ever seen – something we call “Uniregistry.”
Nothing is more important to us than the ongoing, long-term success of our namespaces, and the registrants we serve. Uniregistry has the rare combination of experience, infrastructure, and unwavering commitment required to make it happen.”
Uniregistry is dedicated to supporting the prosperity of our registrants through the responsible and proficient stewardship of the Internet’s best top-level domain alternatives.
Our Vision:
We imagine an intuitive and reliable experience across the Internet for both site users and site creators; equal access to unique, meaningful domain names; and world-class infrastructure for all businesses and individuals.
Our Values:
- Liberty & Fairness – A transparent, egalitarian society in which opportunities are endless and equally available to all registrants.
- Responsible Stewardship – Everything we do is for the present and future good of the Internet, the naming industry, and our registrants.
- Technical Excellence – Providing unmatched reliability and security of infrastructure to our customers.
- Ease & Simplicity – The endless, unyielding pursuit of simpler, more seamless user experiences and product implementations.
“Through our own successful ventures in the second-level domain space, and our rich history of service to registrants, we have a unique perspective on what it takes to succeed in Internet naming. We have channelled those learnings into our core offering and promise of service:
- Uncompromised, high technical standards for reliability and security, including ongoing research and enhancements to our critical infrastructure
- Transparency and neutrality in all policies and processes, including freedom to operate without micromanagement from the registry administrator
- Stable and predictable service, always centered around the needs of registrants, but governed by a strong and even-handed rule of law
- Egalitarian, fair pricing practices and a not-for-profit sunrise period.””
“Uniregistry’s infrastructure is designed and maintained by Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), the world’s preeminent expert in implementation and operation of the Domain Name System. ISC is one of the few organizations entrusted to provide essential Internet infrastructure, including the Internet’s highly-trafficked F-Root server, which is responsible for approximately 25% of the Internet’s root traffic.”
For now Uniregistry is NOT releasing the new gTLD strings it has applied for, or how many.
I reached out to Frank to ask him if he wanted to out himself on the strings he applied for and he respectfully declined saying he is waiting until the Big Reveal on June 13th.
On the new gTLD’s they applied for Uniregistry says:
“We strongly believe in the gTLDs we have chosen and are 100% committed to their long-term success.”
“These new names look better, sound better, and represent a big opportunity for brands to market themselves on the Internet in a different way.”
Uniregistry’s collection of gTLDs was carefully selected by our founders based on their decades of success on the Internet, and in the second-level domain space.”
“We know there is a market for our top-level domain names.”
“We want to make these names available to anyone interested, backed by a reliable infrastructure and a delightful user experience.”
Here is a picture of the Uniregistry Team from its site:
You will recognize Frank Schilling, Vern Jurovich and John Berryhill, Esq. who are all on the team.
Frank recently said he can image a world of 400,000 new gTLD’s and obviously he is making a move into the right of the dot space.
I’m really curious as to what the extensions are going to be.
Somehow I think Frank is going to have applied fort brilliant yet unusually extensions.
I have a feeling he will be the sole applicant for at least one of these extensions.
We wish Frank, Vern, John and the rest of the team all the success in the world and we will be watching the Big Reveal to see what extensions Uniregistry applied for.
Not a surprise to some of us, as there was a TM application for UNIREGISTRY at the USPTO and Uniregistry.com was pointed at the same IP address as webhealth.com for a while (before they moved it to a new IP address).
Brand infringing, Brand confusing, Domain Name Hi-jackers hiding in the Cayman Islands who until a few years ago never gave their name publicly or how to contact them! Cybersquatters who care nothing about the little guy who built up is small business and has his one domain nameand then lagged due to bad things happening and WHOOPS!!! THERE IT IS!!! LET’S EAT IT UP LIKE A PACMAN! LET’S TAKE THAT LITTLE GUY’S DREAM!. They have to hold that hostage and hog that as well and let the little guy’s company name domain sit and do nothing but point to other pointless nothingness domains that go nowhere. Hateful and irresponsible with no regards for small business owners. THAT’S my definition of EVIL.
i believe the man has finally gone insane. just my opinion. other opinions may differ.
So lets recap
Right now you have Directi who has already been highlighted by Bloomberg Asia as a $600M + company, the publicly traded M+M, the guy who started and sold the second largest registrar in the world to Demand which by the way is also applying.
Google.
and now the worlds most successful domainer in the world.
And they are all crazy?
What is that Old Saying ? Keep your friends close…
…and your enemies closer ? 🙂
@MHB
These are smart people and they are not crazy.
BUT:
With everyone applying and 100s of millions of dollars being invested in newTLDs, they are all concerned thinking that what if the new TLDs are successful?
They don’t want to be left behind or let say they don’t want anyone else to control the future (even if doubtful) success of the newTLDs.
I for one, think that newTLDs will be an epic failure except very few that will be successful like net/org/info etc.
But most of the registrants will be big losers.
Facebook IPO 2.0 —
The retail investors will be left holding the bag, while the architects will enrich themselves.
“And they are all crazy?”
Some might conclude that [[Paying ICANN]] any amount is “crazy”.
People with access to unlimited amounts of capital may view the amounts as “pocket change”. Others may be headed for the Refund Service Desk tomorrow.
Another group may think they will always be able to get a 100% Refund with enough legal threats. ICANN has no need for their parked (idle) capital.
The vast majority may feel they are “buying a place at the insider’s tables”.
Good luck with that.
For people with “Beyond Top Secret Information” – the players entering the game are comical not crazy, but they are sadly under-informed. They are like
people in tribal Africa looking up wondering what kind of bird that USAF stealth fighter is. It is hard to have a rational conversation with those people. Where would one start ? ….
…
“Well Columbus sailed across the ocean a long time ago…to .CUBA” 🙂
Mike Mann will also make a move, count the days.
With Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday and the big “Reveal” on Wednesday, some exciting things are about to happen in the World Wide Web and… the TV space.
Unsurprising. If these things crash and he loses a few $m, it hardly matters and his .coms have increased in value.
While if they do well then he doesn’t have look on sickened from the sidelines as his .coms lose value and competitors monopolise areas of e-commerce.
Everyone gets wrapped around the $185K application fee but that’s really just the cost of a good one word domain.
Its the other costs that far exceed the application fee
On the other hand for the cost of Sex.com you can make application for 20+ new gTLD’s each having the potential of generating millions a year ongoing.
I have an idea that a 185 thousand dollar bill and throw it in the garbage then take a picture of the team
PS. Those values look a bit rich coming from someone who buys up .com domains for $500 in the drops, then prices them at $50k such that the majority are taken permanently out of commission.
I have to take exception on the egalitarian society thing. Thousands of names in our portfolio could be. Usinesses but as yet unsold unrequested.
Recently reached out to twenty or so professionals many in the domain industry for help on a web project. No takers or interest.
IMO lack of 400k new dot extensions or lack of a chance is absolutely not the reason that most people aren’t and frankly never will do anything with their lives.
Will there be money to be made in this space. Hope sell better than products or services. Once the truth is revealed the GTLD light will fade and the. money seekers of the world will be onto the next hope gravy train product or service. What’s that saying on Wall st? Buy on rumor sell on news!
“Its the other costs that far exceed the application fee..”
Yes…but
Applicants are going to be blind-sided by what tech people call “Paradigm Shifts”
…and there are also the uncertainties of the marketplace as well as the rapidly increasing interest from Government meddlers (ICANN GAC is only one group)
One piece of good news is that ICANN will not be able to continue their foot-dragging and stone-walling games any longer. There are now many Applicant Teams that have **more talent** (and clue) than ICANN.
It would not be surprising to see the Top 10 Teams break away from ICANN.
Why do they want to spend two years being “vetted” by unknown out-sourced insiders ? ICANN is now skating on their own thin ice of 99.9% Hubris. The
Applicants know that and will be stomping around the next ICANN meeting.
With $350,000,000 on the table, they may get a little more vocal as a group.
Unfortunately, the ICANN Board is largely made up of people who love to
play the stone-walling game. They love “The Process”. Everyone can see,
“The Emperor Has No Clothes”.
Frank’s Team Should be Bidding on the IANA Contract
They could replace ICANN and manage the $350,000,000 “Fund”
It is too bad there is not an election that could cause that to happen.
The ICANN Chairman claims it is unlikely the U.S. Government will change vendors.
This is the first I heard of Uniregistry, didn’t know Frank was going to be applying for the new gtld’s.
No matter what happens, it will be an interesting process to watch and generate a lot of news and discussion.
I would almost guarantee that they applied for .web, because Frank has said in the past that it could be a decent intuitive rival to .com. I’d also guess that they applied for .app
Looking forward to June 13!
Michael, everyone you mentioned is really looking to make money on the Registrar side, consulting side, etc.. Is that not right? That makes sense selling to very willing, new buyers.
However, how many of us will really put thousands….. or hundreds of thousands of our dollars….. into Actually Registering domain names for our own personal portfolios? I really don’t know, but it won’t be me, and I don’t think there will be a lot of takers from the domainer side.
After all, you can spend all your money on .com domains alone if really want to, even if you have unlimited cash, then comes all the other regular extensions out there that we have considered over the years, .MOBI, and .CO ……… etc…. It’s total overload.
It’s also very easy to go broke holding a portfolio of brandable domains that produce virtually no income. I have some exceptional .TV domains that get one unique per year…..LOL. I still love them, but realize my limits in owning too many ghost-town domains. These kinds MUST make enought sales to carry their weight, or they are liabilities. This will be the Achilles’ Heel of TLDs, as is of brand domain portfolios.
I personally believe domainers are at a saturation point as far as regging new domains in countless new extensions. This will have to be fueled almost 100% by the regular public. It’s yet to be seen if they can change the mindset, but they had better Really break out the cash in an insane way to have any effect.
This whole TLD is going to be a spectacle for sure. A bunch of awesome fireworks and an eventual implosion of sorts.
“Michael, everyone you mentioned is really looking to make money on the Registrar side, consulting side, etc.. Is that not right?”
That statement is pretty much dead on. The people who made the most money during the gold rush were the people selling the picks and shovels, not the people mining the gold.
Everyone who has a financial interest in this, I will take their opinion with a grain of salt.
Brad
“The retail investors will be left holding the bag, while the architects will enrich themselves.”
I agree with this statement.
This program was designed to make the rich richer, not to benefit the average person.
The general public always ends up losing on programs like this, where a solution is created to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Brad
Mr. Schilling is arguably the foremost pioneer in the domaining industry.
He may well have an ace in the hole that nobody saw coming.
But, whether this whole new gTLD industry will be successful or not is kind of a moot point for the “vast majority of Average Domainers”.
The barrier to entry for domaining was low. This allowed even those with extremely modest financial means to try domain investing.
That opportunity Still exists. The barrier is still low.
But, the barrier to entry for the new right of the dot gTLD industry if far beyond the reach for most domainers. We can speculate and watch from a distance, but that’s about it. That’s just the evolution of commerce.
Someday, the current opportunity in domaining will be gone. I can’t help but suspect that there is a certain “large domain organization” that has been hoping for that for a long time now.
If the new gTLD concept is highly successful, it could be the first big step in that direction (unless both markets can succeed side by side).
Hopefully, at least .com’s and country codes will hold or increase in value and continue to offer opportunities for domainers for quite some time to come.
The question here isn’t whether or not there’s money to be made with new TLDs. There is. No doubt about that. If there anything I’ve learned during my tour in ‘domaining’ it’s the ‘picks and shovels’ thing.
The big question is whether (or not) these new TLDs shift the .com paradigm.
If there’s a rush to adoption by brands, be prepared for it to happen.
If startups start using them, that might be a signal.
If we see relevant commercial entities actually switch away from their established .com onto their .them (not just one or two, but an exodus), that’s a huge signal.
In the meantime, just because a few savvy, long time domain speculators realize that there’s money to be made by applying their rather esoteric skill set in this hysteria/panic/disruption is not insight into the endgame here.
Most of the new registries are going to look to service end users.
While the understand the importance of domainers they are looking for people who can’t find a good domain to register and will give them lots of choices.
There are over 6 Billion people on the planet and only 250 million domains registered.
When you do the math there is a lot of room to grow.
Also I think you will see a whole new breed of domain investors coming on board, those who “missed” the .com boom or were to young at the time, that will see value in domains like criminal.law or condo.nyc or internet.web or car.shop
etc etc
If this only serves the “I couldn’t get the .com I wanted so I went with .whatever” crowd, that isn’t sustainable enough to justify the influx of dollars we’ve seen already, never mind those that are yet to come. Further, there may be billions of people on planet earth, but the percentage of them that credibly need a domain name is probably < the number of existing .coms in the zone.
I never bought into that narrative early on, it took a huge body blow with the avent of social networking and free web presences.
The TLD shitcan is already overflowing with garbage. Save for exotic cases, we've never seen any meaningful branding on .biz, .us, .pro, .tel, .mobi, .co… and those that did wound up learning a hard lesson. What's to say things will be different with .generic? Even if the brands go with .them, that might help to break up '.com ubiquity' in the minds of John Q, but it's irrelevant for .shop.
Sure, there are a few top level uber-premier examples we can conjure up that are intuitive (lawyer.nyc, bankruptcy.lawyers, deadheads.music) but that seems to be swimming in the same logical cesspool as people who try to rationalize some absurd TLD on the basis of a few 'hacks' that make sense. The waters have to run a lot deeper than that for a registry to make its nut.
Either way, this is really a wait and see sort of thing.
I hope all you huge portfolio holders get spooked and we see some massive dropping of brandable .com's that don't earn. It will be like Chrismukkah.
If you think the comments about TLDs over the past six months accurately reflect the domainer community’s beliefs and actions, then we should expect them to all sit on their wallets for new gTLDs.
I, for one, hope that’s a promise and not just a threat.
The world looks a lot different in 2012 than it did in 1997 and 2002. There are now plenty of large and small businesses that would love to build out digital destinations with names that make sense in neighborhoods that provide clarity about their purpose.
But somehow I have the feeling that domainers won’t be able to help themselves. There’s no way they will be content to watch others snapping up the good names in lucrative B2B and consumer TLDs, while they wait for the next batch on borderline .com names to show up in the drop.
“that will see value in domains like criminal.law or condo.nyc or internet.web or car.shop”
Yes, a handful of keywords will be very solid in most extensions.
Are the registries going to just give these away? Or course not.
Registries exist to make money and will sell their best assets. In general speculators buy these, not end users. This is what kills development in any new extension.
Outside a handful of generics, most extensions have very limited premium keywords (Fitness.Mortgage, Mortgage.Physio, Loans.lol, CarInsurance.Jewelers). As you can see even top tier keywords don’t fit in most extensions.
Brad
There are now plenty of large and small businesses that would love to build out digital destinations with names that make sense in neighborhoods that provide clarity about their purpose.
—–
Glorious concept and all, but what’s the math?
How many small businesses are going to move what they have onto something new, per ‘domainer’ logic about how some new TLD is ‘theoretically optimal’ relative to seventeen years of commercial .com?
Fuck, you still have 3/4 of the Fortune 500 yet to exhibit any sort of consistent comprehension on the marketing relevance of domain names. We’re now banking on Joe’s Chicken Wings to do the heavy lifting for .food?
Of those that have yet to develop their web presence (in the year TWO THOUSAND AND TWELVE), are these going to be the great saviors of the new TLDs, who suddenly find religion and come to the web because .com wasn’t persuasive enough, but .BooYah will be?
Methinks the narrative here is getting pretty damn disjointed from reality.
I’m starting to think this whole dick train is a gigantic short, but for my own finances, wait and see mode is still the best course of action here, while selectively adding .com.
Frank continues to adopt and re-invent but his company but I feel in this case was more of a ” if you can’t beat them, join them” case (hehe) and a bit of leverage aside :
who can stop the gTLDs Tsunami ?*
let’s ride the wave and cast the net.
Shovels and picks is where is going to be at .
Great move getting on of the 2 best domain counsels in the Planet on his side.(I have to be “politically correct”)
Plus the vision to surround himself again with top notch people which he did since day one . ( a la Google) .
Congrats to all partners.
Domo.
* although I am surprise there hasn’t been more opposition from TM holders (USA), they will be almost obliged to protect themselves participating in many if not all “sunrises”.
Strange, the calm before the storm?
I don’t know anything that failed where Frank put his hands… at the inverse.
Humm, now that I think it’s maybe for that he never teamed with me for anything … LOL
My wishes of success to the Uniregistry team!
@mhb
Just as another poster commented, the handful of good domains like condos.nyc will be held be the registry, and that is what is going to kill the registries.
In order for new extensions to make an imoact there has to be ownership of premiums outside of registries and their cronies. That is what makes a market and allows it to develop.
And that is the beauty of .com. Domains were first come first serve, none held back by a for profit registry (except single letter .coms), massive base spread across millions in all countries.
Just as some .me’s are cute and quirky, there will be in other extensions. But on a large and global scale, these new tlds will not make a dent into .com because the premium ownership base per new gtld will be too concentrated. There will be little new goldrush for those who missed out on .com, you are dreaming my friend and I think you know better.
Of course Schilling is going to get in on the new gTLD’s … why wouldn’t he ? He can hedge his .COM investments this way … if his gTLD’s “hit” then he has a new successful business and can make up for a possible decline in .COM values with his new venture … if the gTLD’s are a bust or just break even, then he still has his .COM war chest and can write this off as a failed entrepreneurial venture for a few million.
This move seemed pretty obvious to me after he posted that “change” article a few weeks ago. If anyone is going to pick the few “winning” extensions, I think we can agree there is a good chance it’s him.
“Uniregistry”? Uninspiring name. Very 1980s.
Best of luck of luck to the venture.
Th “big reveal” is coming but you are focussed on the wrong stage- tomorrow Apple will fundamentally redefine direct navigation. Stay tuned.
@Owen, Would you PLEASE comment on my new hand reg in this thread,
Frank Schilling’s Name Adminstration Sells voiceworks.com For $40K On Sedo
one page down?
Thanx!
🙂
Not all roses smell of the sweet jasmine, most of them smell of dog s+hit…so folks, let wait and see what happens.
Sounds like a promising venture with a great team. I’m sure Frank has a few tricks up his sleeve. Wishing Uniregistry good luck on the road ahead.
owen, what’s this apple you speak of?
Is Frank also applying for .uniregistry? Because unless he’s putting up the $185K and buying .uniregistry, his new biz is a fail right out of the gate due to non-commitment to what he’s selling.
This song about sums it up:
Black Sabbath – Wheels Of Confusion
http://youtu.be/3YfIOqUoABc
Frank is Giving Interviews and More Details
The real story is not the new gTLDs but the “partnering with ISC”.
If the ICANN Process kicks off years of DNS Wars, partners may be important.
Partners can also **attract the warriors** so it is a double-edge sword.
The rumor is that ICANN is going to head off wars by having the big teams pick 10 non-colliding gTLDs. That will produce the Fortune 100 the U.S. Government and GAC want.
I’m waiting to get some inquiries on my .co’s
What are the chances that uniregistry does the same as Schilling’s domain name business by overcharging for everything.
.fail
My prediction is that gTLD will start the beginning of domain name demise. I don’t think the domain space is saturated with .com, net, org, tv, me,.. unless you think the sahara desert is overpopulated.
gTLD will simply create vast confusion where most of the users will not know what to type in the address bar. The biggest winner will be google and other search engines because there will be a need to index content differently. Because of confusion users will simply type in the search box, bottom line, the extension is meaningless.
ICANN and others will make a lot of money because of vast speculating, it will be like creating a short lived stock market.
google will be the biggest winner
the more TLDs we have the more users avoid direct nav and go to google.
Some investors follow the money, others follow the traffic.
Fact: There is money to be made in new domain extensions. Selling to speculators is the #1 way of making that money.
Fact: No matter how many new domain extensions there are, the bulk of the general public will never hear of or know of these extensions, at least in a way that gets them to visit without first finding them in the search engines, thus SEO will turn out to be the real factor.
Is there a ton of money to be made? Yes
In 5 years will the new owners that paid good money for them be happy? No
So the question is…are you here to make money or make people happy? LOL
I say let’s make some money.
MB
While discussing the big reveal and initial applications positioning and money making possibilities in the GTLD world as a whole lets not forget about the whois and aftermarket activiy and income potential presented by the mass of confusion and name extensions that apparently are due to arrive.
Wonder if uniregistry will incorporate domainnamesales into their operation as GD does TDNAM?
Good move Frank. I will see you down at the bank then we can have lunch. 😉
@Domains
We knew about Frank going for new gTLD’s a while back. You will see other people from the domainer side jumping on this as well.
@Scott
That would be a logical conclusion that some of the premium domains of the new gTLD’s will be sold through domainnamesales.com
There are over 6 Billion people on the planet and only 250 million domains registered.
VERY VERY TRUE. The problem with throwing numbers like these around is….
Almost half the world, more than 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. These guys have bigger concerns than getting themselves a new gtld domain name. When you dont have food or water, much less a computer who needs a domain name.
80% of the worlds population lives on less than $10 a day
The market you profess to be the demographic for these names is not quite as big as you suggest.
Crazy but you guys keep sucking me in to make comment or suckering as it were and hate myself for it.
Im not sure why myself or most domainers would follow this because you comment negatively because you dont have the money to invest in it. I dont have $180k risk I can take but it seems it doesn’t matter much in positive or negative comments quite FRANK-ly its news but nothing for me.
If this winds up like I thought the (dot) .Travel would be a success years ago, and ask anyone they dont even know it exists, but if was available would have been applied for now without question. So why is it not successful or do you consider it a success?
I would take $185k and invest in .com myself but I do think that the dot geo sites can do very well in selling email addresses alone, and the one one word services could get a businesses to purchase one word premiums.
Others I dont see but then its nothing more than a boost to .com overall still world over.
Dam u for sucking me in,
Lance
Lance
.Travel was a restricted TLD only opened to licensed travel agents.
So it was screwed from the beginning.
Moreover its very hard to bring one extension to market.
Now there will be hundreds of new extensions coming to market including .brands and probably media company’s
So image when you go to a movie and instead of seeing ……..move.com as the address you will see ……..disney or……….fox
Same for Television networks
Same for many cities around the world.
With all the extensions coming the learning curve will be greatly reduced as people will learn what they type in to the right of the dot will be as important as the left.
Would it be fair to say that a reasonable percentage of people trying to get to cheaphotels.newyork, for example, will automatically add “.com” on the end as that is what they are used to.
I seem to remember the owners of xxx.com on stage at the last Traffic show being pleased about all the extra traffic they got/would get, from the existence of the .xxx extension.
Ian.
Ian
I think any owner of a .com that matches a new gTLD will see an uptick in traffic.
Testing, testing…is this Blog connected to the entire Internet ?
Lot of interesting comments. My thought is that there will be some interesting geo and language extensions that should do O.K.. As far as the generic extensions, you have to be an idiot to think that these new for PROFIT registries will give away the best keyword strings for a small registration fee. How many of the 100 Million plus .com websites do you think will change to .whatever? Me thinks not many. Why would they pay the cost of changing and the re-branding expenses. The big players will just get bigger and the average player would be better off with just mining the multitude of good .com’s that are still available. Also, just think about the hundreds of thousands of .com domain names that Mr. Schilling and friends hold. Do you think that they will just write them off. Me thinks not.
Well, good luck to him.
Obviously, he’s a ‘pioneer’ on the web and is willing to put
significant money in to his ideas.
My big concern with the gTLD’s is that no one yet has any
idea how well these domains will be accepted by the public,
and whilst Mr Schilling’s biz plan may not deal with the
public directly, everything boils down to whether they
will like them or not.
Where is the beef?
******************
owen frager PERMALINK
Th “big reveal” is coming but you are focussed on the wrong stage- tomorrow Apple will fundamentally redefine direct navigation. Stay tuned.
Their values:
“A tranparent, egalitarian society in which opprtunities are endless and available to all registrants.”
Their supporters and back-end providers:
ISC
Something is not right here. ISC wrote a piece titled “Taking Back the DNS” on another blog. It received the highest number of comments ever on that blog.
http : // http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100728_taking_back_the_DNS/
It began witht the conclusion “Most new domains are malicious.”
The gist of the announcement was that ISC wanted to enable people to filter domain names. They patched their DNS server software to allow it. ISC and the owner of the F-root does not like people using his DNS server to resolve names that do not bring him profit (a.k.a. “malicious” domain names). He sees a bright line between “good guys” and “bad guys”. Fair enough. (Maybe. Read it and decide for yourself.)
But now ISC is trying to get into the game of creating countless new domain names? Funded by domainers who make some of their best profit from registering typos, including trademark typos, and adult names?
Who is going to register these domain names? If we are egalitarian how is he going to tell one from the other? Who decides who is “good” and who is “bad”? I see no mention of how whois will be handled. Will it be just enough to satisfy the same old minimum ICANN requirement: a cake walk for anyone wanting to register a malicious domain?
If a registrant registers a Uniregistry domain name and wants to send email from his home mail server (“equal opportunities”, according to Uniregistry’s values). Is he going to be blocked as an assumed “spammer”? Or maybe he gets an automatic green light but only if he pays to register a Uniregistry domain name?
This isn’t the first time ISC tried to get into the registry game. They applied for dot org too.
The email issue is only one basic example. There is a lot more to say about this. In simple terms, suffice it to say that flooding the internet with new domain names with myriad purportedly semantic extensions (or are they just clever typos?) is not going to rid it of “malicious” domains. It is going to amplify the problem exponentially. ISC knows this as well as anyone. Talk about selling out.
If I’m wrong on this then we need some answers.
Phil is right. This is the beginning of the end of domain names. All those with any semblance of integrity have left the building. What a mess.
Phil says: “… a need to index content differently”
He’s absolutely spot on. But the winner might not be Google.
The Google “search engine” model, like the ICANN DNS model, is fatally flawed. It relies on creating conflict in order to profit.
Eventually the large players, i.e. the trademark lobby and retail merchants, will say “No mas.” No more Google/Bing-Yahoo/SEO games.
Uniregistry’s values are a hint at what’s needed: an egalitarian solution. At least as egalitarian as what preceded the Google era.
This ICANN new gTLD program, shifting dots around when users can barely handle typing .com, and then jockeying for page one of a Google search result page is not the solution.
Greed will kill centrally managed domain names the same way it kills objective, organic search.
“Most new domains are malicious”
How will ICANN evaluate the reputation of Applicants ?
Are Registrants going to be subjected to a Registry that deems them “malicious” ?
ICANN has a bunch of rules that will disqualify;ify applicants, you can check out the Guidebook for those.
ICANN has outsourced the checking to third parties.
Incidentally, Schilling, Berryhill and Fausett, all who are Uniregistry team members, were all commenters on that blog post. They opposed the idea that ISC was behind. So something has changed, obviously. Namely, ISC’s position.
ISC announced their blacklisting scheme at the Blackhat conference. Guess who is running the new gTLD program for ICANN? The founder of the Blackhat conference.
There’s money to be made selling registrations for malicious domains, spam and other cybercrime. There’s money to be made selling registrations to domain speculators. There money to be made in ognoring trademarks. This is what fuels the majority of registrations. ICANN intends to profit from this. Domainers with heaps of cash intend to profit from this. And now ISC too wants a piece of the action.
Pathetic.
“So something has changed, obviously”
It is surprising that the ABC NBC and CBS nightly news has not reported on all the changes at ISC and ICANN.
ISC brought in a new CEO recently with a lot of fanfare. He is apparently already gone. Domainer blogs did not even notice.
ICANN claims to be bringing in a new CEO but something must be wrong. No announcements have been made. Domainer blogs don’t seem to notice.
America is headed to a major election and most people in the world could not care less. People seem to now understand they have little to say about governance in or out of cyberspace. It is all theater for the rich.
On the ICANN CEO front we are watching and waiting.
If you follow us on Facebook we posted last night this “resolution” that ICANN sent out about a board meeting in which the CEO was discussed:
“””The Board discussed the current status of the CEO/President search. ”
“Information regarding the details of the call shall remain confidential at this time”
So its possible the CEO has been decided and they are waiting until after the big reveal tomorrow to announce.
By the way we post a LOT of other stories and Info only on our Facebook and Twitter accounts
“bringing in a new CEO but something must be wrong”
“its possible the CEO has been decided and they are waiting until after the big reveal tomorrow to announce”
The new CEO has allegedly been attending many ICANN meetings with insiders.
Why would ICANN wait (delay) if a decision has been made ?
Are there actually several choices and the last one standing will be “IT” ?
or has the “First Choice” now decided to go with one of the big Applicants for more money ?
Note: Several years ago ARIN announced a new CEO and he never reported to work. A replacement was quickly pulled from the insider’s club.
Why would ICANN wait (delay) if a decision has been made ?
Because tomorrow is the big reveal and I’m sure the current CEO who was on watch when the program was approved wants to be part of the Big Reveal, actually makes sense to me not to make the change over until after the Big Reveal.
“Incidentally, Schilling, Berryhill and Fausett, all who are Uniregistry team members, were all commenters on that blog post. They opposed the idea that ISC was behind.”
ISC opposes malicious activities in new domains, and are obviously well equipped and well qualified to address the concerns that their experts have raised. There is a lot of concern about whether new TLD’s are going to be responsibly run, and ISC has the expertise to do it right.
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