99% of Registrars Satisfied with the quality of Afnic services
Afnic, the company behind .FR extension, revealed the major trends of its annual survey on the quality of its services.
Here is what the survey shows :
A net increase in Afnic’s overall satisfaction rating, rising from around 8/10 in 2012 to 8.2/10 in 2013;
An overall satisfaction level of 99% (against 97% in 2012);
Major strengths highlighted by this survey show that Afnic is perceived as an organization that:
can be trusted (99% of respondents agreed);
is professional (98%);
is customer-focused (94%);
Areas for improvement indicated by customers for the coming year include:
setting up new services: Registry Lock, Multi-Year Registration, etc.
making more communication, training and promotional tools available to customers (presence at trade fairs, etc.)
more interaction on new areas for economic development represented by the new gTLDs, etc.
How Will Brands Value The Profit And Loss For gTLDs
How will companies work out if their new gTLD will be treated as a profit or loss? Writing on her blog, Jennifer Wolfe attempts to address this issue and outlines four areas companies will need to consider for their brand’s gTLD to determine this.
“For many brand gTLDs, the decision to apply was defensive in nature, and accordingly, not a lot of effort went into creating a P&L,” writes Wolfe. “Some companies were strategic enough to recognize this was a capital acquisition and treated the digital real estate as just that – a capital expense that can be amortized over its useful life, which is typically considered 15 years as an intangible asset. Others may be able to place it in an IP Holding company and utilize certain tax credits for research and development. While some may have simply absorbed the cost in legal or spread the line item across departments as a budget item.”
The four basic use cases companies will need to consider, if they haven’t already, for their brands when creating a profit and loss are: “a digital marketing platform, data mining and analytics, disruptive business models and an internal platform for knowledge sharing.”
Wolfe notes that “each one could have a distinct P&L, but yet there will be economies of scale across these various use case in cost management. This is where the gTLD starts to have real value for the corporation. Those costs of operating the gTLD can be spread across numerous use cases.”
Wolfe concludes by saying that “the future of the gTLD may be evolving within your company, but a clear capitalization strategy and P&L approach could be important to your company’s investment in this new digital real estate. Before allocating to a marketing, IT or even Legal budget, consider how you build the business case and capitalize the asset for maximum economic impact.”
To read the post in full, including more detail on the four basic use cases, go to:
info.wolfedomain.com/blog/bid/375191/What-s-the-P-L-for-the-Brand-gTLD
IGP Proposes Roadmap For Globalising IANA
The Internet Governance Project has released what they describe as “an innovative proposal to resolve the 15-year controversy over the United States government’s special relationship to … ICANN.”
The proposal, which has been published on the IGP blog, “involves removing root zone management functions from ICANN and creating an independent and neutral private sector consortium to take them over, will be presented at the Singapore ICANN meeting March 21, and then formally submitted to the ‘NETMundial’ Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance in São Paulo, Brazil, April 23 and 24.”
“We think this plan provides the roadmap for making ICANN into a truly global and multistakeholder institution,” said Dr. Milton Mueller, co-author with Dr. Brenden Kuerbis.
The contracts ICANN and Verisign have with the US Government “are an understandable legacy of the Internet’s origins in Defense Department and National Science Foundation, the U.S. has maintained control of ICANN long after it promised to let go. This has invited other governments, including authoritarian ones, to demand equal oversight authority over the DNS.”
“Unless we take a consistent and principled approach to non-governmental Internet governance,” Dr. Mueller claimed, “it is only a matter of time before other governments succeed in bringing the coordination and management of the Internet under the control of intergovernmental treaty organisations.”
The IGP proposal is an attempt to develop a blueprint for globalisation of the IANA functions. In summary, the plan outlined on the IGP blog would:
- “structurally separate the IANA functions from ICANN’s policy process, and ensure that the IANA functions are never used for political or regulatory purposes
- integrate the DNS-related IANA functions with the Root Zone Maintainer functions performed by Verisign, and put them into a new, independent “DNS Authority” (DNSA)
- create a nonprofit controlled by a consortium of TLD registries and root server operators to run the DNSA.
- complete the transition by September 2015, when the current IANA contract expires.”
“It’s important/essential not to conflate policy with the operation of the root zone,” Kuerbis said in the IGP post. “It makes sense to put operational authority in the hands of an entity comprised of the registries and root server operators, as they are directly impacted by operation of the root, and have strong incentives to ensure its stability and security.”
“Contractually binding the DNSA to ICANN ensures adherence to the policy development process, and provides an important accountability function,” Kuerbis added. “It’s an institutional design that is consistent with the multistakeholder model and achievable in the near term.”
The proposal was submitted to the NETMundial (Brazil) meeting on 2 March and can be download and commented on through links from the original IGP post at www.internetgovernance.org/2014/03/03/a-roadmap-for-globalizing-iana.
195 Malicious Domain Names Suspended in January 2014
Group-IB ,an Internet security company filed in January 2014 199 suspension notices to accredited domain name registrars. 191 domain names were suspended after the company filed the suspension notices.
Out of the eight remaining domain names, seven were unsuspended by a special request made by CERT-GIB,according to the Coordination Center for TLD RU/.РФ .
47 percent of all suspended domain names were botnet controllers, while only 13 percent were phishing resources.
Group-IB and the Coordination Center for TLD RU/.РФ partnered in order to combat malicious activities in .RU and .РФ Russian domain names.
Check out EuroDNS here to register your .RU domain name.
Cars.com To Be Sold for $3 Billion
Classified Ventures is looking to sell Cars.com for a whopping $3 billion, a few days after the sale of Apartments.com, which sold for $585 million.
Mike Spector, William Launder and Dana Mattioli wrote an article yesterday about the sale :
“A group of newspaper publishers has put the cars.com online marketplace up for sale for as much as $3 billion, hoping to cash in on booming values for e-commerce sites, people familiar with the plans said.
Moelis & Co., which is advising the Classified Ventures publishers consortium on the sale, already has begun discussions with potential bidders, which are expected to include private-equity firms and strategic investors, the people said. It is also possible that one of the publishers could raise its stake or buy out the others.
Cars.com generates around $400 million to $500 million in revenue a year, according to a person familiar with the site. But a new owner potentially could tap roughly an additional $200 million annually. That revenue currently is distributed directly to the owners separate from the dividends they receive, through sales agreements that allow their newspapers to handle ad sales on behalf of Cars.com in many local markets.”
You can read the entire article here .
