Great (I mean GREAT!) podcast. What you really need is a fairly educated person who represents the "consumer" on a call like this.

For example, I would have opined that dotBIZ and dotINFO rolled out services in a manner that stifled the acceptance of their services. Putting Joshua Schatner (of del.icio.us fame) in front of rolling out a new gTLD would show how the rest of the world would start moving away from the general motivation to always type in ".com". When that mentality passes the other gTLDs will take significant root. And reasonable pricing with great service will emerge.

I tend to think about new gTLDs as "area codes". I was always used to dialing '619' when calling San Diego, Ca. but eventually that failed me as 518 was introduced. . And now I pay attention to the entire number. The fact that the few new gTLD offerings have launched with such poor management (and therefore poor results) should not be a reflection of future opportunities.

Adding new gTLDs makes me think of Vonage. Before other options existed I had to pay per minute to talk to Toledo, OH. from Los Angeles, CA. but because of its existence I can now pay SBC a flat fee for as much talk time as I want. Every new gTLD puts the proper (and reasonable) pressure on incumbents like Verisign for .com and its others.

It seems to me that the entire world community suffers Verisign's tactics because of the small IP community's resistence to new gTLDs.

I have yet to hear a reasonable argument against allowing 1000 or more new gTLDs per year -- It always seems to be a very small constituency that robs the rest of the world for their own weak interests.

Once again, terrific podcast. Thank you for making it available and bringing these folks together, along with your thoughts.

Thanks, Tom. You know as much about this space as anyone, so this is a great complement coming from you. Glad it was interesting. The point you make about del.icio.us is a good one. It made me wonder whether anyone has done any study about the success of names in the United States outside .COM, .NET and .ORG. I occasionally come across .INFO names in the wild, but I'd be hard pressed to identify the "most popular .INFO" name. I'm assuming there are some success stories out there though, and I'd be very interested in talking to people who have a story to tell about how they branded their new .INFO business.

Bret

Hmmm. I just now realize the way I framed my initial comment and it seems I might have accidentally indicated that I'm educated. I promise that I was speaking of (and hoping for) someone else. :)

I brought up Josh and del.icio.us solely for the purpose of demonstrating that some folks know how to think "outside of the box". He wouldn't require 2-year registrations for the first few months. He'd make it *easy* for people to register in his gTLD -- He'd make folks *want* to register a name under his gTLD. Josh would not force 2-year registrations at the beginning in hopes of getting money up front. Josh would have made a "special" in the beginning to make it easy to get his new gTLD and it would have soared. Less people would have felt the need to append ".com" to every term because Josh's new gTLD would become too pervasive, too quickly.

I realize that the podcast drifted towards various business models and that seems natural given the attendees and circumstances. But what's strange is, that is what ICANN seems to lean towards... whether or not a new gTLD is going to make money or make a "difference". Inside the typical "Verisign-ish" mentality, new gTLDs are a waste. But since most of us (Yo Chris!) don't believe in the typical roll-out model, it remains difficult to understand why we don't have 1000 or more new gTLDs every year, on the cheap.

There's a thousand or a million different ways to monetize a gTLD, well beyond "type-in traffic". Whether or not ICANN can grok those potentials should not be a factor or at the very least, should not be my fault (as a consumer). It should be incumbent on ICANN to give valid reasons for NOT allowing tons of new gTLDs. I say again that I've not heard a reasonable "reason" for not allowing more (a lot more!) gTLDs but I'd be happy to hear something.

I have a side interest, like you Bret, in what/how folks use .INFO or .BIZ domains -- I think it would be fascinating to know what they're doing. I'm not sure how that should affect whether or not additional gTLDs are allocated in the future. Unfortunately I think the success/failure of current gTLDs is used as a metric for ICANN. I think it plays well into their hands (and when I say "their" I mean the IP world who puppeteers ICANN) which causes the stifling effect that Ambler has endured for so many years.

I understand that I sound a bit grumpy and perhaps I am. Things seems awfully strange when we get into such depth over such a simple matter. I don't know that Chris deserves .web (though I think he'd kill himself if someone else got it after all these years) and perhaps there should be a process for getting control of a gTLD but I do know that there is no reason whatsoever to have been constrained for so long to the few gTLDs that we have available today.

Thanks, Tom. More good stuff. Just a quick comment on your last point: does Chris "deserve" .WEB? Here's my way of thinking of it. I first met Chris and his team back in 1997. They wanted .WEB. They had asked for .WEB in all the pre-ICANN arenas as well. In 2000, they bid for .WEB. They still want .WEB. They've been planning this for a decade. I don't know anyone else who has had a passion for any TLD as long as these folks. The fact is that we still need registry-to-registry competition, and I'd rather see a TLD like .WEB go to a new market entrant than one of the established players. I'd also like to think that perseverance is rewarded, not punished. Sometimes I think folks want to keep .WEB away from Image Online Design out of some perverse sense of schadenfreude. Let's just get these days of seven new gTLDs every decade behind us and move on.

Bret

The only popular .info domain I ever run into is MTA.INFO, which belongs to the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. It's hardly a good example, since they're the only option if you want to know how to get from Manhattan to Queens in a hurry.

you just have to look more for those things ! there are more .info sites that are actualy good !

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The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of labor, capital, technology and resources.
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hey Brett,

I'm listening to your (nifty) podcast and wanted to reply to your request for ideas about a better way to record Skype.

First , a comment -- the sound isn't as bad as you think. Nope, not studio, but not bad. Sounds fine on the cheezoid speaker on my laptop. You're probably listening through really good speakers and finding it hurtful, but through crummy speakers it sounds fine.

However, here's a link to a nifty write up about how to do that by Doug Kaye (host of IT Conversations and general all-around podcasting hotrod).

Here's another piece of good news -- you need a mixer to make this work. So you can use your neato mic and mixer combo and have something that sounds really great.

I too found the podcast very helpful, but from a slightly different perspective. I'm working my way through trying to figure out the rollout for a 2nd level registry for "corp.com" domain names (Afilias being the infrastructure provider). It was a great gift to be able to listen in on all those insights in the podcast. Thanks!

Mike OConnor (www.haven.com), a newby in this space, although I've been at the Internet thing a while.

Why Afilias as your infrastructure provider?

Hi Chris,

um, being a new kid I am a little edgy about deflecting attention from the great podcast that you guys did. So I'll keep this reply really terse. Happy to say more, but maybe in a different thread?

Anyway the short version is that I actually made the arrangement with Edmon Chung and Neteka in 2002, just before they became part of Afilias. I like Afilias for a bunch of reasons -- Edmon, solid tech, connection to the industry, perspective, support, etc.

I'm less curious about why you would choose Afilias (I can think of dozens of very good reasons for that) and more interested in why they would choose you! But now that you've mentioned it, I think the idea of selling third-levels under .COM is intriguing. If what Antony said today is true, then .COM will be the main driver of traffic for a long time to come. The fact that Afilias is considering being the registry for a level to the left of Verisign's .COM is fascinating. Thanks for the nice words about the podcast. I'll definitely follow up on those tech tips.

Bret

In Afilias' defense, Edmon contacted me about doing a corp.com registry before Afilias was formed. I wouldn't want to leave the impression that this was Afilias' idea -- it was a straggler left over from Edmon's earlier company Neteka. I haven't met the Afilias board folks (I hope to at my first ICANN meeting in March), but in talking to Edmon I get the sense that the board's reaction ranges from bemusement to careful willingness to try this as an experiment or trial.

The idea of third-levels has been around a while (heck, I got the domain back in 1993 with that idea in mind). But the time hasn't been right -- I'm not sure it is even now, but I've always liked to hang out with the early-adopter crowd and this feels right for that.

I agree wholeheartedly with others when they say that some of the roll-outs have been sub-par. If I can impose on you just a little more, here are my inclinations so far;

- I want to give trademark holders a chance to get their names easily, before opening the thing up to the world. But I don't feel comfortable charging a premium for that -- so I'm inclined to reserve the names, but charge the normal rate during some kind of pre-registration period.

- I'm also disinclined to do premium prices for generic domains -- I find myself bugged by that when I run into it in other places.

- It seems to me that my job as a registry is to provide tools to help registrars sell names -- so I've asked the marketing gang that's helped with my other businesses to run up a series of sample treatments that registrars could use to approach/expand their market. (I'm hoping to have a few of them back some time next week)

- My hope is that corp.com names might be a good door-opener for registrars to approach a good market (small to mid size businesses) and that in exchange for opening those doors they would reward us with selling our names as part of a bundle of services. But if we get the door open, and the domain doesn't get sold, that's OK with me.

- I'm disinclined to have the registry sell directly to end customers, as I think may create channel conflict

- Same goes for most other services (email, hosting, etc.). Would that we should get to the point where a domain-drop service would be worthwhile.

As you can see, the issues that you all were discussing in the podcast were exactly precisely the things that I've been pondering as we get the registry up and running -- I would be really interested in continuing this discussion but Brett feel free to snip this off any time it starts to bug you.

We're also looking at doing the same thing with "nv.com" for Nevada.

Investigated having our own registry written for this (or modified based on the .za registry) or working with CentralNIC in possibly doing something with them too. Didn't think about going to Afilias for this though.

Lots of good pricing models to work off of. i.e. .tv with their premium names to a standard fixed rate. Not to mention the upsell of hosting, e-mail, etc..

Shane Kinsch
Global Internet

Thanks for the note, Shane. Is the .ZA registry software open-sourced? I've been looking at various registry solutions as well. I know about the ISC Open Reg project and the .NZ open source project. Any others? Have you done any performance or feature comparison?

Open Source Registry Projects:
ISC: http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sw/openreg/
.NZ: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dnrs/

-- Bret

Hi Bret. I actually meant .NZ vs. .ZA. I haven't gone the next step in having a registry developed based on either the ISC or .NZ code.

I know CentralNIC has been pushing the us.com, uk.com, etc.. for a while now and have agreements with eNom and others to resell their sub-domains. They also seem like the appropriate group to kick start up my nv.com since they have some of these arrangements already in place, but I'm still working out the pricing structure, business plan, etc.. and only had minor contact with them.

I know sub-domain registrations off of nv.com would be a nice addition to everything else. It's just a matter of getting it marketed in my opinion and making some time go get it off the ground.

Shane Kinsch
Global Internet

Branding, plus given the traffic is naturally at .com and not wishing to appear quirky, are all reasons why new gTLDs face an uphill struggle. For most people, (corporates especially) it is easier to play safe and go with a longer or more expensive .com Frasi sul amicizia

Truly great Podcast . A few thoughts….

Sunrise policies are going to have to evolve. .eu is very interesting…
Abused? Depends on your point of view I guess, but some people are registering trademarks by the “shed load” to get in before the hoi polloi.

It seems one guy even flew in from the US to set up a small company (to meet the nexus requirements), bought several hundred new trademarks from a less restrictive trademark office, and then applied for the corresponding .eu names.


Branding in new gTLDs is difficult because you have to brand on two elements rather than the one if you were to choose .com.

Branding, plus given the traffic is naturally at .com and not wishing to appear quirky, are all reasons why new gTLDs face an uphill struggle. For most people, (corporates especially) it is easier to play safe and go with a longer or more expensive .com

It is going to need some serious innovation to change that mind set, just “being there” is not likely to cut it.

It looks like www.whois.sc is to become more main stream by re-branding to www.domaintools.com


Paul.

One thing I should do, that I didn't do while we were being recorded, is make it clear that I was speaking my own, personal opinions, as a part-owner of Image Online Design and the .Web Registry, and not as an employee of eNom, where I am currently doing other, cool things. Just to be clear :-)

Paul: chill. :-)

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