Re: OpenSRS Live Reseller Update [.com/.net & .name] - 13/02/03

[elliot noss]

You are right wrt .es or .fr, but you are not with respect to .uk and .de. .ca is interesting because Canadians overwhelmingly used .com until registration was liberalized and since then it has shifted significantly (it was 90% .com and 10% .ca and is now probably somewhere at 30-50% .ca (Paul, CIRA should do a study)). The Chinese and Japanese governments recently liberalized registration in .cn and .jp with this goal explicitly stated. Some smart ccTLDs are very real, very competitive namespaces in some national markets. Others are irrelevant and it typically is almost completely a function of how liberal registration policies are.

The new gTLDs are another story. I have ragged on both Afilias and Neulevel repeatedly to focus ALL of their marketing efforts on programs that incent usage. Imagine if you regularly received email from someone using a .info name. Think of how subtle and powerful that impact would be. To date they haven't listened. I really believe this is execution not structural. .com will always be .com, but it is a question of how .com .com will be (sorry couldn't resist).

Regards

On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 01:38 PM, Roger B.A. Klorese wrote:

Ross Wm. Rader wrote:

I think you need to pay some closer attention - .uk, .ca, .de and .biz are
all doing reasonably well as .com substitutes (or as primary choices ahead
of .com depending on the market...)

I have NEVER received any contact from a business of any significance in .biz. And as for the country domains, companies in those locales rush to try to get relevant .coms before considering a domain that identifies -- and therefore restricts -- their home market.