Domain Name Search and Domain Registration Services on the Web
Posted by admin
Registration Services on the Web You are 101 - More of the Web Engines FREE NewsletterSign Up Now for the newsletter! Search From ,Your Guide to .w(’Have an Idea? ‘) FREE Newsletter. one computer’s address on the Net.
.XXX domain taken off ICAAN's agenda
Posted by admin
The approval of the .xxx top-level domain (TLD) at an ongoing meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in New Zealand has been taken off the agenda.
Mobile Domains For Sale In May
Posted by admin
Posted by Reverend on 31 Mar 2006 - 20:45 GMT | || Mobile Top Level Domain (mTLD), the company behind the .mobi (dotmobi) domain, will begin registering Internet addresses in May geared toward mobile devices, a company executive said Wednesday.
Mobile Domains For Sa
Posted by admin
Posted by Reverend on 31 Mar 2006 - 20:45 GMT | || Mobile Top Level Domain (mTLD), the company behind the .mobi (dotmobi) domain, will begin registering Internet addresses in May geared toward mobile devices, a company executive said Wednesday.
Bank domain names overdrawn - F-Secure
Posted by admin
Computer security firm F-Secure has done an survey into the number of bank names that have been registered as Internet domains, but not by the banks themselves.
Is the Cost of Domain Names Going Up?
Posted by admin
Yahoo News reports that a deal has been reached in which Verisign must meet certain conditions before raising prices on domain names. In a deal approved by ICANN, Verisign is allowed to raise its annual fee for domain names, an increase that domain registrars can then pass along to the consumer.
Verisign currently operates the servers that constitute the Internet’s core address book for “.com” web sites. The company sells “.com” addresses for $6 each to registrars who then sell them to the public.
The deal is facing opposition from some registrars not only because of the price increase but the fact that it will give Verisign the right to renew its contract with ICANN when it expires in 2012. “We are disappointed that after hearing from so many Internet stakeholders about why this proposal is anticompetitive, the ICANN board still approved a known bad deal,” said Champ Mitchell, chief executive of Network Solutions Inc., a registrar that was sold off by Verisign in 2003.
Verisign of course is pleased with ICANN’s approval noting that it is very similar to a deal reached last year over .net name of which Verisign also retains administration rights over.
Icann approves VeriSign .com monopoly
Posted by admin
The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has voted to approve a settlement with VeriSign that allows the company to raise the price of domain registrations.
Icann, which oversees the world’s top level domains, voted 9 to 5 in favour of the settlement. Board members will be allowed to post statements about their votes on Icann’s website in the coming days.
VeriSign operates the infrastructure behind .com internet domains under an exclusive licence.
The settlement ends a lawsuit that the company filed after the 2003 Site Finder debacle, in which it tried to reroute internet traffic from unregistered and mistyped domain names to a VeriSign owned website.
The arrangement grants VeriSign the right to raise prices for .com domain registrations by seven per cent annually in four of the next six years. The company also agreed to pay Icann an annual contribution of $6m to $12m.
VeriSign currently charges $6 per domain per year and the price hike could boost its revenues by as much as $140m between now and 2012.
A group of domain registrars has attacked the settlement, however, claiming that the deal provides VeriSign with an unwarranted financial windfall and allows the company an uncontested renewal of its contract in 2012.
VeriSign insisted that the settlement is similar to the arrangements that it made for the .net domain last year. The company said in a statement that it was pleased with the decision and called the agreement “straightforward”.
While the Icann board’s approval removes a major hurdle, the new domain registration rules still require approval by the US Department of Commerce.
Another news piece highlighting the interesting but bizarre tale of Internet use in China
Posted by admin
The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) in China has announced sweeping reforms that will change the Internet domain system in China. The three top-level Chinese domain names under the “China” domain will now represent “Academics”, “Military”, and “Government”. All of these new domains will be accessible via Chinese characters.
Under the new system, besides “CN”, three Chinese TLD names “CN”, “COM” and “NET” are temporarily set. It means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States.
China has had rapid Internet growth over the past several years, with the country reportedly having upwards of 125 million Internet users. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for assigning and distributing official internet domains, was transferred from the US to the United Nations. In the past, ICANN’s stance on non-Romanized characters has been hostile at best. China’s move to promote its own domain system with Chinese characters is precedence for other countries to embrace their own writing system for domain names — Arabic and Korean domain brokers are already hammering out the details for natural language domains.
China creates own Net domains
Posted by admin
Internet authorities in China have set up a new family of Chinese-language alternatives to .com and other popular Internet address domains. It’s a move that bypasses the US-sponsored organization that controls address information for the global Internet, and some analysts fear that it could enhance China’s ability to censor its citizens’ access to the Internet.
The Chinese newspaper People’s Daily reported yesterday that the new system will feature Chinese versions of the existing .cn, .com and .net domains. ‘’It means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States,” the paper said.
American control of ICANN is a sore point with many foreign governments. Last year, the United States fended off demands to remove control of ICANN from the Department of Commerce and put it under the auspices of the United Nations. American officials said that China and other countries wanted control of ICANN to censor political and religious information on the Internet.
Some Internet analysts say that by setting up addresses that don’t rely on ICANN, China is gradually creating a domestic Internet that will be far more susceptible to censorship than the US-controlled version. ‘’Chinese users in theory right now will still have access to both,” said Michael Geist, Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa. But over time, Geist said, the Chinese could completely disconnect from the ICANN system and route all internal Internet traffic through their own domain servers. ‘’It’s now a Chinese-controlled system,” Geist said. The process could make it easier for Chinese censors to block out ‘’subversive” information from outside the country, he said.
But former Stanford University professor Subramanian Subbiah said the policy is driven by the desire to make the Internet more accessible to Chinese speakers.
Subbiah, cofounder of I-DNS.net, a Singapore company that sells Internet domain names created in non-Western writing systems, said that China lost patience with ICANN, which has not made Internet addresses available in Asian writing systems. Chinese Internet users can type a website address in Chinese, until they get to the Internet domain, such as .com or .net. Those letters must be typed in Roman letters, because ICANN has not adopted a technology for recognizing the words in Chinese, Arabic, Korean, or other non-Western languages.
‘’ICANN sat around for eight or nine years, with everybody begging them,” Subbiah said. ‘’Go learn English, they said at first.” So he began working with Chinese officials about two years ago to use I-DNS technology to solve the problem.
Subbiah said that censorship probably has nothing to do with China’s announcement because the Chinese already control the ICANN-linked root servers inside their country and are censoring Internet information. ‘’They’re doing it today; they’ll be doing it tomorrow,” he said.
ICANN spokesman Andrew Robertson declined to comment on the Chinese announcement, saying that ICANN officials needed more time to confirm the accuracy of the news report and consult with Chinese authorities.
Disconnecting China from the standard Internet could cause a number of other problems. Chinese traveling outside their country would not be able to access Internet sites using the Chinese domains, because the ICANN-based Internet would not recognize the Chinese addresses. A user would need special software to route queries to the Chinese network.
A new Chinese version of the .com Internet domain could cause a replay of the online gold rush of the late 1990s, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance at Oxford University. ‘’It’ll be fascinating to see whether global companies feel compelled to register Chinese-language counterparts to existing .com names,” he said.
Scarcity of 3 and 4 letter names.
Posted by admin
Recently It has been seen that many domain with 3 or 4 letters have been picked up in a flash from the market.
Whenever I go to the aftermarket ther bids goes higher then $100 for 3 letter .com names. even some 4 letters are going higher then $100.
New domainers don’t have a chance to bid out the big guys. Is it possible that there will be no more 4 letters or less then 4 letters .coms totall unavailable in an year or so? It is yet to be seen.