“You may not incorporate the Adobe AIR trademark, or any other Adobe trademark, in whole or in part, in the title of your Developer Application or in your company name, domain name or the name of a service related to Adobe AIR.”

It sounds like oxygen theft to me.

“The Board today accepted a recommendation from its global stakeholders that it is possible to implement many new names to the Internet, paving the way for an expansion of domain name choice and opportunity” said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN. A final version of the implementation plan must be approved by the ICANN Board before the new process is launched. It is intended that the final version will be published in early 2009.”

At a high level, this is what the recent Paris junket meeting was about:

1. Domain Tasting

ICANN doesn’t *really* make any money out of this, so they decided to make the 20-cent registration fee (paid to them) non-refundable to reward their friends, they then made domain tasting almost impossible for everyone except the most popular registrars. As these registrars have high numbers of domain registrations, 10% could be a high enough number to perform a good degree of tasting.

2. Dot WhatEverYouWant

Give anyone the ability to create a .WhateverYouWant, thus decreasing the value of existing domain name portfolios. It would appear that ICANN is a little bit irritated by domainers who had the vision (and took high risks many years ago) to snap up valuable domain names. After all, ICANN didn’t make the millions the domainers did.

3. Foreign Superpowers

Allow non Latin characters such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic. Chinese being the largest ccTLD, soon to be the #1 superpower. Arabic (that’s English for oil) and Cyrillic (Russia - say no more). While the PR spin is to make it a warm, fuzzy internet for everyone (lets hold hands now and sing koom-by-ah) - I don’t believe it for a nanosecond. It’s all about making money for a small group of people.

I’ve already covered domain tasting and other character sets in other posts, so lets focus on adding more domain name extensions.

Why Is This Bad News For Domainers

Allowing anyone to create an extension could:

1. Decrease the value of existing domains. What if a single company controlled .sex ? How much would that be worth!?!?! How do you compare the value of lesbian.com to lesbian.sex ? Yes, I had to use that as an example. Ok, well what about www.newyorkrealestate.com compared to www.realestate.newyork or newyork.realestate ? Get the picture?

2. Lead to mass confusion amongst the public. What is an Internet address? Wasn’t that .com ?

3. Change the flow of traffic on the Internet. This is because Internet browsers and search engines may give preference to other domain extensions. Say goodbye to “type it in traffic” to .com.

4. Increase the number of trademark violations. How does ICANN expect to handle that? That’s ok - there are a lot of lawyers who are on “advisory panels” that can profit from giving advice. For those around in the early days of the Internet, Network Solutions ran into the same problem (and largely ignored it for awhile until it got out of control).

5. Attract the wrong type of people to the industry. In recent times we have seen a lot of dodgy “management” around various extensions and ccTLDs. Do we need any more people getting attracted to this new “gold rush”?

Impact On Existing Domain Portfolios

If you hold a large portfolio of anything other than .com, then you might find it decreases in value. For example, .net, .org .biz and .info and .us are not in a good position. However, those people who have purchased geographic domain names (eg: newyork.com) are also at risk. I’ll just pay off ICANN and create my own .newyork extension.

Why Does ICANN Do This?

Again, I believe that it’s all about ICANN making money for a small group of people.

1. ICANN looked at tasting. I can imagine the conversation - “hmmm… we’re not getting a cut… I know, lets make the 20-cent registration fee non-refundable!”.

2. ICANN looked at Verisign. I can imagine that conversation went like “hmmm… how can we multiply this? I know, lets give anyone the ability to create .whateveryou like, and then they pay $100,000 a piece to us (ICANN) for the privilege.” Multiply that out, per every conceivable extention you can think of, and that’s a MASSIVE of money.

By the way, just in case anyone didn’t notice:

ICANNs memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Commerce expires in September 2009.

What happens when ICANN gets so much cash in the bank it has more dollars than a small country? It already has gone about publicizing its view that it should be independent of the US Department of Commerce. Is ICANN going to be “a nation” that controls the communications infrastructure of the world?

How much $$$ is it worth to turn the Internet into a train wreck?

So, if you are thinking about getting into domaining, and don’t really have the time to put into it, then one option might not be to buy domain names at all. Buy a company whose business IS domaining.

Dark Blue Sea (owners of Fabulous) - Listed on the ASX, their current share price is AU$ 39 cents!

Marchex - Their current share price is US$12.61

These companies (and several others) own large portfolios of domain names as well as multiple businesses in the industry. However, like any financial investment you will need to do some research, and get some good financial advice from a professional.

The judge issued a temporary restraining order against the “unknown entity”, Atlanta Sports & Entertainment Marketing.

Court documents reveal various allegations, including that Mayweather objects to his name and likeness being used in conjunction with boxing and related services.

It’s been reported that the site allegedly costs $50 to sign up to a membership, where you can view video and other footage of the boxer.

While the website is still online, the content is no longer available - “404 Not Found”. It looks like Mayweather has won round one!