> WHY do you think that whitehouse.com and duke.com were X rated sites? Because > they KNEW that people would go there BY MISTAKE. You would THINK that one > would be the president of the US headquarters, and the other a university. > THEY use GOV and EDU though. If they were competitors, it would be worse > for the original domain owner.
Yeah, but I type in whitehouse.com, see some pr0n and decide I got it wrong. So I try again, with .GOV, or maybe just Google. And I find it. You haven't lost my business. > NF/NL is different in that one had the same local prestige as COM, and now > they have decided to switch. As for conspiracy? I don't know if it is > one person, several, or something dictated by higher ups. The effect is > the same, and so is the reason. Reason? The post office, who is in charge of official abbreviations for provinces and territories, decided to switch. They announced it in April 29, 2002 to comply with a request from the government of Newfoundland and Labrador to change. Canada Post made it effective October 21, 2002. CIRA is just following along, like when they added .NU.CA domains. So real reason for the switch is the elected representatives of Newfoundland and Labrador asked for it. If you or your customers have a problem, complain to your NL MPP. > Heck, maybe ***YOU*** don't get spammed as I do, and maybe YOU haven't noticed > the ads. You don't have to read too much between the lines to realize that > they are trying to blur the meaning of the second level domain name to get > people to buy their new TLD. Heck, many even say flat out that people will > prefer theirs in a certain case and/or that you may lose business. I got > one such message from a company selling CA TLDs, in fact. I get plenty of spam (more than real email), but how is that relevant? To assume that the reason behind this change is CIRA trying to get more money out of people for a "new" TLD is really pushing credibility. Yes, some .NF.CA domain owners are going to have to decide whether to stay with their existing domain, make the switch, or get both. But no one is going to lose business over this. Actually, if CIRA were really smart, they would do the following: somehow map the DNS requests that come in for a non-existant .NF.CA domain to the existing .NL.CA DNS, and vice versa. At least for a couple of months to give people time to adjust. > Why should the government step in and basically act the same way? I don't know. I didn't vote for the MPPs that requested this. As your .NL.CA customers. > As for losing half your market? I NEVER said that! I said you would lose > SOME of your market, and that more would be lost over time. Of course, > if they disable the older TLD, you will lose nearly 100%.(I'm assuming some > are loyal, hear about the switch, etc... to avoid it becomming 100%) That > is a given. You are right, you didn't say "half" ... I infered that. But do you mean a .CA registrar will lose market share on this? That's absurd: the market just got bigger. And customers may feel the need to register both variations of the name ... another increase in market. They may also decide to finally switch to just .CA to avoid this issue in the future: another benefit to registrars. Or do you mean .NF.CA domain holders with web-businesses will lose business because people will type in the wrong TLD? Again, that's pushing credulity a bit. If they know about the switch (which they probably do), they'll probably try both. Then again, any print materials that the company has will surely list the correct address, so you can always refer to that. And, lastly, who is going to take one stab at a domain name and give up if they get it wrong? If they are really interested in the products of that company, they'll do a web search ... which will turn up the right domain. - Colin Hmmm .... maybe they should've just gone for .NFL.CA instead ... :)
