Three new TLDs in the Root: .KP, .ME, .RS

Please welcome North Korea (aka Korea, Democratic People’s Republic) (.KP), Montenegro (.ME), and Serbia (.RS) to the root zone.

Delegation was approved at the recent Special ICANN Board of Director meeting on September 11.

My compliments to Kim Davies and David Conrad at IANA on a smooth process from board approval to root addition.

It appears that the zones were added to the root, but the IANA whois does not yet list the administrative entities for these published yet.

.KP was delegated to “Korea Computer Center”.

.RS and .ME are going to be replacements for the former .YU namespace (formerly Yugoslavia – and YU left the ISO3166-1 list), with a 2-3 year responsible transition of that namespace as .YU is sunsetted. .RS is to be operated by the same adminstrator of the .YU ccTLD.

New TLDs – What’s Your Idea?

What are your ideas for new top level domains?

Because of my tenure in the namespace market, I have the privilege of being a person that folks trust for open feedback on their TLD applications for the upcoming rounds next year.

I’ve heard or seen over 50 different pitches or business concepts at this point for new TLDs.
Some are great and have a ton of commercial appeal, some are not bad in that there is a good premise behind what they provide as an experience for the end user, and some are not going to get over a thousand registrations in their lifetime (and they’re good with that).

Lots of duplications… Of the over 50 that I have seen, there’s 1 that I have seen 4 separate potential applicants for, 2 that I have seen triples of, and 9 that I have seen duplicates of, and the rest are individual strings.

Great minds think alike, and I am certain I have not seen every application out there.

I know most every registry platform, the various providers who outsource these capabilities, and technical requirements for resolution and registration services, and also understand the registrar channel well, because I have operated registries and registrars.

If you are a person could benefit from a chat, I’ll put it out there that I am discretely reviewing these on a pro-bono basis, and am glad to offer any feedback privately.

ROM Workout machine arrived…

OK, I ordered one, and my ROM machine is here.  I am going to start working out daily and track my weight and shape here.

Thanks to friends with comments.

I will say this:

The process of ordering the ROM and their handling of shipping was one of the most white glove processes I have ever experienced.  Kudos to the company on this.  Many companies could learn from them.
The machine is beautiful and every attention to detail was made in its crafting, down to the mat that is included and the locking device that has its combo identical to the last 4 of the serial number.

4 Minutes pass like the breeze, but I am sore beyond belief after.  It either is working or I am really out of shape.  Or both.

‘Hacking’ My Body with the 4 minute ROM workout machine

What do people think of the fastexercise.com “ROM” workout machine? 

 Please comment!

OK, I came to a relization that I am a growing boy, and unfortunately that stopped being vertical growth after age 19.  Realizing that I can have more energy, and be more healthy in general if I do more exercise than I currently am doing, I decided to step up and do something.  First step of course is to break away from a pattern of  oreo binges.

 I travel a lot (hence the name of my blog), and I notice there is an ad in the in flight magazines for the ROM 4 minute workout machine.  4 minutes a day of intensive workout.  No More.  No Less.  I can afford 4 minutes’ time.

With tax and shipping and what not, a unit comes in at just about 16k in costs, but I mentally justified the amount because I figure (hope) that perhaps the benefits are far greater than that amount.

Should I make this purchase? 

I will open up comments on this one to the general public to see what comes back before I move on this, because of the amount to be spent here.

Afilias and GoDaddy join to bid for .US ccTLD

Just in from around the net, Afilias and GoDaddy have arranged a joint venture called Alliance Registry and have announced their plans to bid for the .US ccTLD that is currently run by NeuStar.

Well recognized and respected industry name Brian Cute was named as the director of usTLD Development, yet another high powered hire in the domain industry to lead the process.

I have no opinion on this process, but this was interesting news today!

Hosting Companies : You totally get it!

I just had the opportunity to speak and moderate a panel at HostingCon in Chicago on the domain name industry and the secondary market for domain names.

There was a packed room, and with me were Sean Stafford of DNZoom, Frank Mitchlick of DomainNameNews.com and sharedreviews.com, and Tim Schumacher of Sedo, plus lots of very intelligent CEOs and senior management approached me throughout the show with a series of relly intelligent questions about the domain name industry.

I came away from the event with a few takeaways.  One is that my friend  Isabel Wang  totally gets it, two is that most hosting companies are clueing into the thundering sound of lost revenue rolling off the edge of the earth when their domain names expire, and third was that we’re experiencing immense growth in our industry to see a conference of this size be so well orchestrated and focused on business development so well.

Props to Frank, George, and Sue at Inter Juncture, and much success to you!

Registry Failover Planning Should include Registrar Provisioning

I commented on a public document.   Let me be more specific…

Recently, there has been some talk over what a registry failover would need to look like, in the event that a new registry provider would need to be designated.

As new Top Level Domains (TLD) are introduced, many of them include failover testing or have described their disaster recovery plans, but these typically are focused upon natural disasters or acts of god, etc.

It is vital infrastructure, to be sure. As vital as the number of registrants or users that utilize the TLD, at least.

I spent some time reviewing the current registry failover plan, and noticed that it was very well written and prepared. I commend ICANN staff for their very thorough and hard work.

The place where I commented about perhaps adding some specificity is in trying to ensure that registrars can quickly unplug and re-plug their connections (and I am super-oversimplifying the actual process) to minimize registrant impacts for domains under management.

I’d also note that the likely driver of this document was not natural disaster or act of god, but rather the potential financial failure of the publicly-traded parent company to the registry.

While the circumstances that were likely driving the urgency of this planning have been relieved in the near term, this is an important proactive measure to ensure that effects to the namespace and users are minimized to the fullest extent, and then all of that security and stability is present in transition.

Domain Marketplace moves…

The Domain Marketplace converged on New York this week for the Sedo User conference and T.R.A.F.F.I.C., with other events like the DomainJamNYC happening in the midst of it all.

Lots to report, though I am not there. Oversee.net completed the acquisition of Snapnames (which is like peanut butter and chocolate getting together), and Sedo announced their acquisition of GreatDomains from VeriSign.

Fabulous is gaining ground with their DDN, announcing that large regsitrar Tucows is coming aboard there. Tucows also completed a $3M(USD) premium portfolio sale, and announced their secondary market platform.

Moniker will be performing the worlds largest domain auction this week at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference.

DomainsBot is demonstrating new technology that categorizes or identifies the language of domains when submitted a list of names.

Pool.com has launched myrebel.com as a platform allowing consolidation and management of domains into a single registrar, but leasing one of the creds that are owned by momentous/pool.

DNZoom.com, a consolidated domain management platform, was announced by Modern Gigabyte, and looks promising as a central platform.

Webex as a platform

I just have to talk up Web Conferencing provider WebEx and their service. I have been in many web conferences that this platform has supported, and it worked each time without a hitch.

Adobe now is offering a variety of web conferencing solutions as well along with Acrobat, it seems. Consumer choice is good. I will post once I compare all of these.

The Jothan Frakes Islands (.JF)

For the past 10 years I have been contributing quietly to the DNS and TLD infrastucture in both private and public companies, in a variety of technical roles. Over the course of that time, I have gotten the opportunity to work with some fantastic and brilliant people.

And there were some that have not been as kind or bright (or at least not as bright).

Being passive aggressive in nature, I took it upon myself to come up with a method of determining who was copying my source code without crediting me for it (or at very least, asking), by putting a nice little Easter Egg into one of my forms.

It started initially as a joke, but quickly proliferated.

examples:

[link] [link 2]