Should Scotland Have Its Own TLD?

Ahh Scotland. The top bit of that big island known as the UK. You know the place: William Wallace, Braveheart, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Well it appears that they are a little bit irritated by “sharing” .uk and now they want their own TLD. Hmmm.. cant think of any reason why a Scotsman wouldn’t like the English.

Apparently the First Minister Alex Salmond visited the Spanish region of Catalonia and found this thing called the Internet. It turns out that Catalonia has .cat and so he wants .sco – just don’t tell him about SCO Unix. By the way – pussy.cat is taken.

“It is not only for Scots who live in Scotland but for our extensive Diaspora and it will be particularly appropriate for a bid to be made during the 2009 Year of Homecoming” Salmond said. I’m wondering if that means that all the Scots are leaving us to go home now its the new year?

It might come as no surprise that there is strong support for dot scot; according to the UK Press Association “Two government surveys showed support among Scots organisations running at 58% and in an international poll, the figure rose to 82%”. Scotland’s governing party, the SNP has got together a working group and is preparing for the submission to ICANN (assuming .anything-goes).

Word also has it that Groundskeeper Willie wants bigwillie.scot. So what do you think? Should Scotland have it’s own TLD or be made to share with those lovely English folk for a little while longer?

Somalian Government Wants .so TLD Back

Its been reported that the government of Somalia has applied to IANA requesting the control of the .so TLD. The current delegation of .so is listed in the USA under:

World Class Domains
c/o Monolith Innovation Group
Box 8159
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 15217
United States

Apparently .so isn’t operational, so its expected that “World Class Domains” will have to hand it back or somehow prove that the government of Somalia gave them permission to run it.

Jim Reid, founder of RTFM told Network World that “The process could take days, weeks or months; it depends on the workload of IANA staff. It is unlikely that IANA will ignore a request from a sovereign government.”

Given the public telecommunications system was almost completely destroyed or dismantled during the civil war and that there is no Internet Society, its going to be interesting to see how this is managed. My guess is someone is going through a list of 3rd world countries saying, “Hey, there is this thing called the Internets – its like a series of tubes“. Lets hope Somalia doesn’t go the same way as our friends in Nigeria.

ICANN – Kill Off & Recreate The Domain Name Industry

Is ICANN the right entity to provide oversight of the Internet? Given the crazy proposals that have received board approval, I believe its time for a change before the Internet crosses that “point of no return” and ends up in a total mess. ICANN said in a recent press release:

“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?

Algorithm To Check Visual Similarity of Top-Level Domains

As new TLD’s spring up like wildflowers, how does ICANN ensure that it meets the requirement of “Strings must not be confusingly similar to an existing top-level domain …”? Well, Paul E. Black at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has come up with an algorithm to assess the degree of visual confusion between proposed or existing TLDs.

Two implementations of the algorithm, have been published on the NIST website, titled “Compute Visual Similarity of Top-Level Domains”. The first implementation can compare a string to proposed TLDs. For example, .pro has a 38% similarity to .prof.

The second implementation can compare two strings to each other. For example, .com and .cm have a 22% similarity to each other.

It will very interesting to see how this evolves over the coming years, especially with the possibility of different languages being introduced.