The Wild-Wild West of the Internet!

by Chuck Kisselburg

Last week I attended the Domain Roundtable Conference in Seattle. The conference focused on the owning and managing of domain names. In attendance were those who own domains, otherwise known as domainers, as well as the organizations who manage the portfolios of the domainers.

In a sense, this is where you meet the true cowboys and cowgirls of the Internet. I have heard people say of domainers that they are all about grabbing as many domains as possible with the goal being profits. Some people I talked with did not like the fact that there may be factors that may limit when they may acquire available domain names. In other words, every person for themselves! Thus should I screem, Yeeeeha!?

Yet as I sat through various sessions, I heard presenters discuss:

Establishing a business plan

Creating LLCs

Developing domain names to create greater value and branding

Apply for patents around developed domains

Domain name financing

Asset evaluation

Understand foreign legal and political structures when acquiring domain names with country code extensions

What is a domain name's ROI?

Valuation metrics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Domain name portfolios

Exit strategies

The more I listened, the more I understood that domainers are not the lawless, wild-west figures some come to believe, but entrepreneurs. Yes, you can follow the link to entrepreneur, but within that post you will find the following:

An entrepreneur is someone who seeks to capitalize on new and profitable endeavors or business; usually with considerable initiative and risk.

There are some domainers who have been wildly successful in acquiring, developing and selling domain names, while others are just starting out have a few domain names, but limited cash that prevents them from developing domains.

There is no doubt domain names equate with money. Just check Jay Westerdal's blog on the auction, held at the end of the Domain Roundtable Conference, to gain a sense of the value of some domain names up for auction.

So is the Wild-Wild-West still alive on the Internet? I believe there is a bit of the Wild-West in every entrepreneurial venture/market. Are the domainers the cowpoke pushing the envelope regarding Internet real estate? I think so. Is this a bad thing? I think not, especially when domainers work to develop a brand/market for domain names owned. This is no different than a typical Mom & Pop shop trying to develop and grow their business. Now, for those out for pure personal greed such as the domain tasters, yes, I see no community value in such practice. However, my perspective is many good things have evolved by pushing the envelope.

What are your thoughts? Do you see domainers as traditional entrepreneurs? I would like to hear from you.

.asia, A Social Networking Goldmine

In a previous post of mine, titled Giving Birth to a New TLD, I wanted to take a moment to remind us of the new, .asia Top Level Domain (TLD), by DotAsia, that will soon be available for use. What does this mean? Does this mean instant community? Hmmmm…. What is a community?

Being a social networking enthusiast, I have built, managed and merged social networks, or “communities”. Needless to say, the idea of a never static, always changing, living “community” excites me.

So, when .asia appears on the domain landscape, does that mean instant community? My thought is there is no such thing as “instant community”. Building a successful community requires a common theme, or sub-themes, common goals and a common purpose. But in the life of a living community, the strength and weakness of any given community changes, whether frequently or over time.

When looking at “communities”, formed based on TLDs, we have country specific TLDs, or ccTLDs by which a country’s populace can rally around. We can also rally around a particular TLD based on market verticals, such as .com, .org or .edu. We do have .eu for the European Union, but as I have heard people mention, with .eu comes a common legal structure, common currency and common passport that binds the .eu countries into a definable community.

So, where may this leave .asia? In the application process the DotAsia organization obtained support from the following organizations. The coverage is huge. When looking at the countries alone we are looking at:

Afghanastan, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Macao, Mongolia, New Zealand, Niue, Phillipines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, as well as the three organizations of APNIC, APNG and PAN/IDRC

What I really, Really, REALLY like about this mixture is:

1. You are dealing with countries both small and HUGE, population-wise.
2. You are dealing with countries both small and HUGE when looking at global economic wealth.
3. You are dealing with countries that span the technological spectrum.
4. As a region you are dealing with countries that do not have a common language.
5. As a region you are dealing with countries that do not have a common religion.
6. As a region you are dealing with countries that have varying geographical demands.
7. As a region you are dealing with countries that hold differing political structures and ideologies.

So, am I surmising that creating a common community among the .asia supporters is doomed? NOT AT ALL!!!!! In fact, I see a goldmine for various, healthy communities. In my experience, a community is not based upon one single thing. As referred to earlier, a community is like a living organism, taking on different shapes and strengths. Not only can all those who support the .asia extension come together as a region and have a stronger global voice, there is fertile ground for the development of sub-communities, or sub-social networks, based on any one, or a combination of the seven items mentioned above; all using .asia as a common thread.

So, will the success of healthy, thriving communities rest on the shoulders of DotAsia to form and manage all of the various potential communities? No! DotAsia is providing and managing the common thread, however it should be up to the supporting partners and organizations to recognize, develop and drive the potential .asia offers them.

To help with this effort, DotAsia has announced their Pioneer Domains Program. Instead of opening up the .asia domain for domainers to purchase .asia domain names with the idea of selling or potentially developing, DotAsia is doing a smart thing in that they are kick-starting this community by having visionaries come forward and let people know their ideas for how they would develop a .asia domain; a domain that shows the beginnings of a working, healthy community. Those visionaries would then be chartered to begin developing their .asia domains.

Any community takes effort and time, but I feel DotAsia, this not-for profit organization, is taking the right steps in planting the seeds for a successful, grass-roots developed .asia.

Birthing a New TLD!

As we move forward with all of the stresses and commotion of our everyday lives, we need to be reminded that a new TLD will be available soon, that being “.asia”.

Change is always interesting and this will be no different. It will be interesting to see what impact .asia has not only within the domainers community, but within industry itself.

With respect to the process, I wanted to take a quick moment to look at the beginnings of .asia. While the official signing ceremony was held on 6 December, 2006 between ICANN and DotAsia a couple of events had to take place prior. Prior to the signing of the .asia Registry Agreement. DotAsia had to obtain support, file an application, that was reviewed by a non-ICANN review panel over a period of six sessions, a time for public comment and then the process where comments were addressed regarding the application for the .Asia gTLD. As you can see, “Compared to hundreds of emails articulating anxiety with regards to .ORG, .INFO and .BIZ registry agreements, there were only two emails expressing issues with the .asia contract from the public comments forum.”

When you think about the process, a lot of work goes into the “birthing” of a new TLD.

What are your thoughts on .asia?

Check back again when I post on how I see this community becoming a social networking goldmine!

Practical Implications Regarding ICANN's IDN TLD Evaluation Deployment in the Root Zone

In my blog post, titled, “Evaluation Deployment in the Root Zone” I discussed ICANN's program to enable routine introduction of TLDs (Top Level Domain) within IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) labels that utilize non-ASCII code sets. While some may be VERY familiar with the ASCII code set, others may not be aware that ASCII even exists. "Hey, a letter is a letter, right?" So, whether we know it or not we are used to using the ASCII character set. ICANN's program, however, looks at utilizing non-ASCII code sets.

Since my last post on this topic I have had a chance to talk with a couple of people from non-English speaking countries to examine the practicality of the program’s end result.

In one instance I was told by one person how difficult it is for his wife, who is Chinese, to communicate current URLs to her friends in China when talking on the phone. For example, when talking about URLs, simple communication moves to translation, where possible, of each letter found in a URL. So in this example, utilizing non-ASCII sets within IDNs would be extremely helpful.

But as another person stated, “I thought the Internet was to be global!” In other words, if we start including non-ASCII character sets to allow for multiple languages, might we loose the global aspect the Internet represents today? Would people start thinking more regionally instead of globally? Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? I am interested in your thoughts.

However, let’s take this discussion out of the high level to a more practical view.

I had a detailed chat session over this topic with a friend of mine who lives in Sweden. Even if, or when IDNs are in place, will applications, other than browsers, be able to support non-ASCII character sets? For several years the “.SE” country code has been recognized. Great! You would then think that with an internationalized, or in this case the Swedish, version of Microsoft Office that all would be well and that Swedes could now begin using simple characters such as å ä ö. This may work well in Word, for creating documents, but when it came time to entering www.göteborg.se, the browser would not recognize the “ö”. It was only after IE 7.0 was introduced that “ö” was even recognized. But by this time, everyone was used to entering www.goteborg.se (with an “o”) instead of www.göteborg.se (with an “ö”). In other words, people are used to using the English-based character set instead of their native Swedish-based character set. Well, you say, “If now supported in IE 7.0, well all is good then, right?” Perhaps not. Let me answer a question with a question, “Do you suppose EVERYONE has upgraded to IE 7.0?” My take on this would be “no”.

To take this a step further, is it only the browser we need to be concerned with? No. Let me explain, as my Swedish friend and I were chatting over Yahoo! Instant Messenger, we were tossing URLs around. What he pointed out, which is common for his fellow Instant Messaging (IM) Swedes is when you enter a URL via your IM chat session, Yahoo! will underline the URL. You know, like what we are used to seeing, such as www.goteborg.se. However, when we used the letter “ö”, in the URL, such as www.göteborg.se, the underlining stops at the “ö”, thus displaying www.göteborg.se.

OK, so you say, “That’s Yahoo!’s problem!” Are you sure? Is this oddity limited to Yahoo! Instant Messenger? Test this out with other IM packages and let us know.

OK, so you now say, “Could this be a Microsoft issue?” Well not exactly as we tested Linux as well. To be specific we used a Linux-based system only to find that when sending an e-mail to someone whose e-mail address included a normal Swedish character, such as “ö” or “å”, the e-mail would result in an error message to the sender. For the purpose of example, I am changing my name from Chuck Kisselburg to Chuck Kåsselburg. My “NEW”, fictitional e-mail would now be chuck.kåsselburg@icannwiki.org. When sending an e-mail to myself the error message I would receive would be, “Syntax error in mailbox address chuck.k?sselburg@icannwiki.org (non-printable character)”. So, this is another example where people will be forced to deviate from their native language, to continue using the English-based ASCII character set.

So, while my Swedish friend said, “While this may work well from the TLD perspective, everything needs to catch up.”

Someone also told me that when the Country Codes, managed by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authroity) came out, some organizations moved to secure their ".com" equivalent with their respective country code, or country codes. Still, a couple of years after acquiring their respective URLs with their respective country code extensions, they were not really able to use them because, while defined, had not yet been fully implemented. Some felt this was a way for money to be made without providing the associated value. Also, what was discovered was as the country codes came out, many businesses did not realize this, so other people purchased an organization's .com country code equivalent, placing that organization either at risk or facing a potentially expensive alternative to purchase back their country code specific URL. Some did not bother to acquire their .com equivalent.

True, some people would say talking with a couple of people does not represent a proper scientific, statistical sample. This by no means exhausts all of the issues surrounding ICANN's IDN TLD program, but it does raise issues to think about.

What are your thoughts? Have you had similar experiences? Let us know!

Thoughts on ICANN's IDN TLD Evaluation Deployment in the Root Zone

I just wanted to take a moment to look at the effort underway by ICANN regarding the program that enables the routine introduction of TLDs (Top Level Domain) with IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) labels.

I find this effort to be both ground-breaking as well as monumental in its overall concept. What this means is this program will pave the way for domain names to be internationalized, containing non-ASCII character sets. To me this speaks of the fact that domain names will contain character sets that may not be recognizable to other users on the net. From a pure social networking perspective, this can yield to a much more localized experience for Internet users; an experience that can possibly help foster cultural heritage.

True, the effort underway today is to test how DNS (Domain Name System) will accommodate such a change. The test will be to use the TLD of “.test” and localize “.test” in eleven different languages to see what effects this may have on the whole DNS structure. Through the use of “scripts”, words will be translated to their respective languages. One of the purposes of this test is to develop the process for quickly removing such IDN-based TLDs should the DNS structure become unstable. The scope of the immediate task at hand is well defined, manageable and will utilize a non-production DNS structure.

However, when examining the overall goal, think how monumental this task can be! Think of languages in general. How many languages will this effort eventually be able to support? Doing a quick scan of languages, I found one page that lists the “official” languages of India. As you can see, the list is as follows:

Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kasmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

However, another page lists the languages in India that are spoken by more than 1 million people of India. Those languages include:

Assamese, Awadhi, Bagri, Bengali, Bhili, Bhojpuri, Chhattisgarhi, Deccan, Dogri-Kangri, Garhwali, Gujarati, Haryanvi, Hindi, Ho, Kanauji, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khandesi, Konkani, Konkani(Gaonese), Kumaoni, Kurux, Lamani, Magahi, Maithili, Malayalam, Malvi, Marathi, Marwari, Meithei, Mundari, Nepali, Nimadi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sadri, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, Urdu.

Hmmmmm…… So how many other languages of India are there that are spoken by less than 1 million people? Who will decide which language, or languages, to include for a specific country?

What about language nuances? While vacationing in Austria we ran across a German-Austrian dictionary. While to some that may appear perfectly fine, the astounding thing is both countries speak German! Although small it was amazing to see that there is enough of a difference between how either country uses German that there should be a German-Austrian dictionary.

Getting back to IDNs, it will be interesting to see what challenges arise when dealing with languages whose character sets contain non-ASCII characters.

One avenue to help maintain a stable DNS structure is to handle IDN-based TLDs through browsers utilizing scripts to translate the information into the structure we use today, instead of having DNS handle the translation. But getting back to the shear complexity of this simple statement, think of languages that are written from right to left. Think of languages that have difficulty with any character set translation. One item that came to mind were languages that use clicking sounds within their vocabularies, such as the ever popular . Imagine talking with someone over the phone and telling them to write down this URL! As stated in the draft proposal titled, "IDN Application Evaluation Facilities", the “IDNA currently requires that a string of characters in a script written right-to-left neither begins nor ends with a “combining mark". (A string of left-to-right characters may not begin with a combining mark either, but it may end with one.) The clearest example of resulting difficulty that has thus far been noted is with Dhivehi, the official language of Maldives. This is written in the Thaana script (in the Unicode range U+0780...U+07BF), which requires the addition of a combining mark to every base character. A vowel following a consonant is indicated with a combining mark, and special combinations are used to indicate consonants and double vowels in syllable final position.”

Also, what about the length of the word? Right now the longest TLD is six characters in length, that being “.museum” and “.travel”. While this has been extended to support larger words, we may find that language localization, especially if official country names are used, “… stored strings of up to the maximum of 63 characters require evaluation”. Can anyone recite the longest word in the English language? Does anyone KNOW the longest word in the English language? Well, here it is – all 1185 characters! Based on the context of this discussion I found it humorously ironic that the first message on that page is, “The correct title of this article is too long. Article title lengths must be less than 256 characters because of technical restrictions.” Hmmmmm... A shadow of things to come, perhaps?

The other monumental challenge I see is proper translation. First of all, type out a single paragraph, find a site that will do a free, on-the-spot translation for you. Next take the translated text and translate it back. Do you find the exact same paragraph/context that you originally typed? The other aspect is how organizations deliberately misspell words to appear “edgier”. Might this signal a move away from the deliberately misspelled words back to proper-spelled words? If so, imagine what impact this might have within the domainer’s world!

Yes, while this concept will start with the use of the mere word, “.test”, I feel the challenges and implications are nothing short of ground-breaking.

Check back as I will have another posting on the practical implications from the user’s perspective; a perspective from non-English speaking countries.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Please chime in as this is an open community. Discussion is healthy and we want to hear your opinions.

Greetings! I thought you all may find the below news from Sedo of interest.

Sedo Brokers Sale of Chinese.com for $1 Million

Cambridge, Mass., July 23, 2007 – Sedo, the leading online marketplace for the buying and selling of domain names, today announced that it recently brokered the sale of the domain Chinese.com for $1 million. The deal marks Sedo’s first seven figure sale in 2007.

“Domain name sale prices often follow trends in the marketplace, and Chinese.com certainly indicated the massive economic interest in China,” said Matt Bentley, chief strategy officer, Sedo. “Additionally, the transaction further demonstrates Sedo’s expertise in the premium domain name market.”

Sedo is currently auctioning several premium domains – including Chinese.net – through its GreatDomains.com brand as part of a seven day auction. Other names for sale during the auction, which ends on Thursday, July 26, include StockQuotes.com, Accessoires.com, Shrimp.com, Whisky.com, Debit.com, Markets.com, Sweatpants.com, Albinos.com, Cantonese.com, Dads.com, Yoyos.com, MedicalRecord.com and Subscription.com.

About Sedo Sedo, an acronym for “Search Engine for Domain Offers,” is the leading online marketplace for buying and selling domain names and websites. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Sedo has assembled the world's largest database of domain names for sale, with more than seven million listings. The success of Sedo’s model has attracted a global membership base of more than 350,000 domain professionals. Sedo is majority-owned by AdLINK Group (ISIN DE0005490155 / German WKN: 549015), which is part of the German United Internet AG (ISIN DE0005089031/ WKN 508903). Sedo offers regional versions of its site for the UK (Sedo.co.uk), France (Sedo.fr), Germany (Sedo.de), and Spain (Sedo.com). For additional information, please visit www.sedo.com.

Press Contact: Mike Kaplan fama PR 617-758-4156 sedo@famapr.com