.Buzz and .Ruhr new gTLDs to Launch in January,2014
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has recently published the Start up plans for .Ruhr and .Buzz new gTLDs.
According to ICANN,the Sunrise Periods will start in the second half of January.
Both new gTLDs pla to have Land Rush periods too. According to Encirca.com, .Ruhr is the first “Start Date” Sunrise,meaning that they have a 30 day announcement and then a 3- day Sunrise Period (first-come,first-served).
Is GoDaddy Greedy .VENTURES Vox Populi Extorting .SUCKS?
Greed is good. That is one way of looking at it. Or there is always supply and demand. And we can soon see how strong the demand is. GoDaddy is asking for a very pricey $12,569.99, the starting price for phase one of their Priority Pre-Registration for .ventures domains.
Prices then cascade down to phase five with prices starting at $219.99. Phase one closes on 30 January with each phase then starting a day later, except for phase five, where there is a three day break, ending on 5 February.
And then there are the prices for trademark owners, which start at $229.99 while pre-registration starts at $69.99 per year.
Applying for domains in phases one to five of the Priority Pre-Registration period includes a fully refundable Early Access Fee for unsuccessful applicants. When there are multiple applications for the one domain during any phase will see the domain go to auction.
But this is certainly not as greedy as the Vox Populi Registry, who is they are successful intends to “charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in its Sunrise period, should it win the TLD,” according to a Domain Incite report.
Vox Populi Registry is one of three applicants for .sucks, the others being Donuts and Top Level Spectrum.
Prices for .sucks domains for Trademark Holders who reserve now are $2,500. This fee will jump to the whopping $25,000 in Sunrise. And then when it comes to general availability, the “suggested retail” price will be $300.
The greed not only ends there. Domain Incite reports “it’s become the first new gTLD applicant that I’m aware of to start taking pre-registration fees from trademark owners while it’s still in a contention set with other applicants.”
“At first glance, it looks like plain old trademark-owner extortion, taken to an extreme we’ve never seen before.
“But after 45 minutes talking to Vox Pop CEO John Berard this evening, I’m convinced that it’s worse than that.
“The company is setting itself up as the IP lobby’s poster child for everything that is wrong with the new gTLD program.”
Domain Incite also believes it has the highest “sunrise fee in any TLD ever to launch.”
Of course, Vox Populi doesn’t view it as extortion or greed.
Their CEO believes Vox Pop’s .sucks proposition is, if anything, “under-priced”.
“Most companies spend far more than $25,000 a month on a public relations agency, most companies spend more than $25,000 a month on a Google ad campaign,” the CEO John Berard told Domain Incite.
“Companies spend millions of dollars a year on customer service. We view .sucks as an element of customer service on the part of companies,” he said.
The quite lengthy Domain Incite report concludes:
“It’s a horrible reminder of a time when domain name companies were often little better than spammers, operating at the margins and beyond of acceptable conduct, and it makes me sad.
“The new gTLD program is about increasing choice and competition in the TLD space, it’s not supposed to be about applicants bilking trademark owners for whatever they think they can get away with.”
2013 Highest Reported .COM Domain Name Sales
IG.com was the highest selling .COM domain name in 2013.The domain name changed hands for $4,7 million.By comparison, in 2012, Investing.com was the highest reported .COM domain name sales at $2,45 million.
Here are the top 20 .COM sales of 2013:
1.IG.com$4,700,000
2.KK.com$2,400,000
3.114.com$2,100,000
4.eBet.com$1,350,000
5.tieFix.com$850,000
5.tieHot.com$850,000
7.MathGames.com$725,000
8.ReverseMortgages.com$600,000
9.tieFinances.com$500,000
9.tieHousing.com$500,000
11.Brand.com$500,000
12.tie Jobs.ca $450,000
12.tie Shout.com$450,000
14.Body.com$380,000
15.Booker.com$375,000
16. Ride.com$325,000
17.tieDJI.com$300,000
17.tieYinhang.com$300,000
17.tieMojo.com$300,000
20.Moms.com$252,000
KPMG Says Its gTLD Will Be Default Domain, Abandoning .COM, While It Looks For Innovation
The global audit, tax and advisory services firm KPMG has announced they will be moving from their kpmg.com domain to their new gTLD .kpmg when it is up and running. And this assumes it gains the final approval from ICANN.
“As the primary signal for our brand’s internet addressing, .kpmg will replace kpmg.com,” David Green, head of global digital marketing told World Intellectual Property Review. However such a move will take some time and be a gradual transition.
“The time it takes to get to that stage will depend on general public awareness of the gTLD programme,” Green notes. “We won’t immediately drop .com; there will be a phased migration.”
The decision to apply for the gTLD was decided by following “an internal ‘feasibility study’ on whether to apply for a gTLD and, if yes, what to apply for, says Green, noting that 17 senior KPMG executives were interviewed.”
“We had a very clear understanding from the outset that we were not applying for a domain name—we were applying to operate a secure registry system at the world root of the internet. There were several advantages to applying, but the primary motivation was to operate a registry system, because it can provide a number of operational and technical advantages,” Green said.
These advantages, he explained to World IP Review, included having “superfast servers at the root of the internet” and the ability to resolve lots of queries: a fantastic processing power such as the .com registry can handle “millions of queries per second”.
“It’s a massively scalable database; these registry systems have a proven ability to host millions of unique entries,” he says. “And you have more secure point-to-point internet communications as well as unique addressing, which is where most of the conversation during the application stage was focused.”
The company also believes it will help visitors to the company’s websites to be able to ascertain they are indeed at a genuine KPMG website, the company noted in their new gTLD application.
“It will therefore increase consumer and client trust and reduce the possibility of malicious conduct. It may also allow us to engage with internet users in their native language, creating a more positive user experience,” World IP Review dug out of their application.
As has been hoped by ICANN, and others such as ARI Registry’s Adrian Kinderis, Green believes new gTLDs will lead to innovation online.
“The gTLD programme is going to be hugely disruptive to business models, a core change to the internet’s infrastructure. It could have as profound an impact as the invention of the World Wide Web itself,” he claimed in the interview.
“Many brand applicants, which represent about a third of the overall number, applied to operate a registry system and I think a lot of the future innovation in the domain name system (DNS) will come from brands.
“Brands operating closed registries in particular have very different motivations for operating a gTLD registry from incumbent domain industry actors and new gTLD start-ups, who essentially view this liberalisation of the DNS as an expansion of the existing domain name market,” Green said.
Green noted that the innovation he is thinking of has not been thought fully through yet. And quite possibly he doesn’t want to divulge all of KPMG’s plans. But he does say “machine-to-machine internet communications will eclipse human-generated internet traffic. For a thing or device to connect to a network, part of the required authentication and verification for a transfer of information or secure delivery of digital services will be a unique key field,” he said.
“So you start to see how these registry systems will be used not just for domains for addressing purposes, but we might need to start thinking about domain numbers and serial code numbers, which could be used for verification and access to further enterprise systems.”
Search engine optimisation (SEO), Green added, was another big advantage of having a .kpmg domain, despite Google’s refusing to disclose how favourably its search engine will treat gTLDs compared with other domains.
“Google uses many different criteria in its relevance and ranking algorithm. One of those is the domain name: if a domain is a key term, it will have a greater relevance for people searching for that key term. So any website under a .kpmg domain is clearly owned and managed by KPMG, and the domain should have a higher ranking in that regard, although this will not mitigate the need to address other SEO considerations,” he says.
But the SEO benefits may not be so great. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the webspam team and an engineer in the search quality team, said back in March 2012 that new gTLDs will not be favoured over their .com equivalents. Whether anything has changed in the meantime though is not clear.
“Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD),” Cutts wrote on his Google+ page. “Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”
Microsoft Files UDRP To Gain Control Of XBoxGiftCards.com Domain Name
Microsoft has recently filed a UDRP complaint at the National Arbitration Forum,asserting legal rights over XBoxGiftCards.com domain name .
Microsoft owns many trademark registrations for the “Xbox” mark all over the world.Therefore,it is more than obvious that the disputed domain name is confusingly similar to its trademark.
Microsoft filed the complaint with the National Arbitration Forum December 13,2013 .
The National Arbitration Forum will examine if the domain name is confusingly similar to the trademarked name.Moreover,it will examine if the owner of the disputed domain name has rights over it and if the domain is being used in bad faith.The domain name will be passed over to Microsoft if it falls under all three of these stipulations.
The case is still pending compliance checks with the National Arbitration Forum
