Comments

1. Dave Tyrer says

   August 15, 2018 at 6:01 am

   I would like to suggest we need a discussion about categories.

   If you look at the 28 ccTLDs in today’s list, of course, they are in fact all country codes in a technical sense.

   However, a highly a disproportionate 10 of these are dot CO – of which 8 or 9 are in English rather than Spanish – Commerce, Hire, Card, Map, Store, Legal, Apostrophe, Fruits and P2P (?).

   Also, the two dot IO domains probably have nothing to do with the Indian Ocean and Quant dot AI surely has nothing to do with Anguilla, rather, AI is used to symbolize artificial intelligence.

   In domain investing, as in equity investing, it’s important to have focused strategic information with minimal noise so you can try to see future trends.

   So maybe it would be more useful if the 28 names in the ccTLDs category was split in two, something like this:

   1. Repurposed ccTLDs (or maybe Alt ccTLDs)

   This might contain 9 of the dot COs, the 2 dot IOs and the dot AI. Total 12.

   2. The (true) ccTLDs.

   This would then contain the remaining 16 ccTLDs that will likely be actually used in a national context.

   A revision something along these lines might help to build up a clearer picture of the emerging alternatives to dot COM – whether new TLDs or repurposed TLDs like dot CO, dot TV and dot ME.

   Or maybe the repurposed TLDs could just be a sub-category of the ccTLDs.

   (Some would be hard to decide and call for an educated guess.)

   By adding the above 12 “repurposed ccTLDs” to the existing 8 “other” TLDs gives you a total of 20 alternatives to the 46 dot COM domains in this report. Observing this comparison over a long period of time may prove useful especially in the lead up to the dot WEB launch.

   …Also, it seems likely that ICANN will hold another round of new TLD launches in a year or two. We will then have to think up a way of categorising these to distinguish them from the existing “new” TLDs!