elliot noss wrote:
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.You hit the key, though -- in NATIONAL markets.
Businesses who want to focus on their national markets are more likely to get a national domain.
I don't deal with very many companies like that.
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.
It would imply to me that the .com name was taken.
