insight 

Today saw the launch of .tel, a domain intended to act as a repository for contact data and an information sharing platform, rather than as an address for a web site.

Owners of .tel domains will be able to populate them with their contact details, such as their phone numbers, email addresses or GPS data and store this information directly into the Domain Name System.  The data is then displayed in a standard way for anyone visiting the .tel address, no matter what browser or device they are using.

Owners of .tel domains will be able to manage their contact details via a simple dashboard and include as much or as little information as they want to.

The “sunrise” phase for trademark owners to get domains related to their brands begins today, followed by a “landrush” phase open to anyone starting on 3 February 2009. The final general availability phase starts on 24 March 2009 when the domain will be open to all comers.

There will be a number of factors that have an impact on the success of .tel, most importantly how businesses react to this new top level domain (TLD).  Businesses will need to be aware of the potential uses of .tel and how it can work for them.  They should have a clear and robust domain name strategy in place, so that when new TLDs such as these (and there may be potentially many more coming with the new ICANN process for allocating TLDs opening up next year) come onto the market they are ready for them.

As can be seen from data within our recent domain name industry report the challenge for new top level domains is to serve a particular market need, increasing their usage over time and thus sustaining long-term popularity.  For instance, our report revealed that 81% of UK SMEs choose .uk as their primary web address and consumers choose to visit a .uk site because it shows a business is local and trusted. It will be interesting to track the success of .tel.

Tomorrow brings the start of the third meeting of the United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum, a multi-stakeholder forum that debates a range of issues relating to Internet governance and works with all stakeholders to create a safe, fair and inclusive Internet experience.  This year’s event in early December will be held in Hyderabad, India.

Here at Nominet, we are saddened by the tragic events in Mumbai over the past week and offer our sympathies to the families of the victims and the wounded.

The IGF meeting is going ahead as scheduled and we wish all those taking part well.

Engaging UK stakeholders

Nominet, working with other partners, has been at the heart of preparing the UK for the Internet Governance Forum.  We see it as crucial to engage constructively with the IGF process, both in contributing to the discussions with ideas and in identifying examples of how to get the best out of the Internet.  With other UK stakeholders we are identifying “messages from the UK” and best practice case studies, using a partnership approach to making the Internet a better place, and keeping UK stakeholders engaged in the IGF process.

This approach has developed over the life of the IGF, and led us to launch the UK IGF in March this year.  This is an open partnership that provides a light and flexible framework for British stakeholders to work together to make the IGF a success.

We have recently launched a UK IGF web site and blog, which we hope will encourage the sharing of views and opinions of all stakeholders on the work of the UK IGF and emerging Internet Governance issues. It is also intended to be a mechanism to report updates from the UK IGF partners.

The challenge for the UK IGF is to create intelligent, collaborative solutions to problems of Internet governance and the outcomes of Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge clearly demonstrate to our international colleagues that we are making great strides in this area.

International participation

Other countries are seeing what we are doing and beginning to start running their own processes at the national level.  Each national process will of course be different, reflecting local priorities and concerns. We will be running a workshop in Hyderabad in collaboration with colleagues from Brazil, Finland and France to explore different national IGF approaches.

One key aspect of the UK’s engagement in the IGF is to work with parliamentarians.  This has been crucial in helping us develop our messages – in particular in helping understand the concerns and interests of the citizens.  Working with parliamentarians has helped us to focus our work on these key issues – like child Internet safety or fighting crime – and to engage with top decision makers from industry and civil society.  One British MP has been leading a multi-stakeholder dialogue using the IGF model to improve e-crime reduction in the UK.

The UK is proving that the Internet Governance Forum works, as a collaborative partnership between Government, business, civil society and academia, because it is not subject to Government legislation and is free from bureaucracy.

With the US election finally reaching its conclusion today, it was interesting to read an article in the New York Times recently about domain name trends for the two presidential candidates.  Technology media company IDG used DomainTools to query for domains and discovered that there were 2,357 domains registered for Barack Obama and 1,431 domains for John McCain.  When they expanded the query to domains with either “Obama” or “McCain” included in them, the results were 11,089 for Obama and 5,378 for McCain.

Digging deeper into the various domains registered revealed that there was a mixture of sites for and against each of the candidates, as well as their running mates.  Some of the domains were likely to have been registered or run by the campaigns themselves, in an effort to control the message.  Among the others, not run by the campaigns of either candidate there are a variety of sites including clear expressions of support or opposition; attempts at political satire; entrepreneurial sites selling items and inappropriate domains.

There’s lots more detail and various trend analysis available of web traffic over at Network World, which sheds a little more light on how the campaign went, much of which is of course redundant in the light of today’s result.  However, it does, of course, demonstrate the ever increasing usage of the Internet and the impact of web 2.0 in such campaigns. It also gives some pointers for brand managers (lets face it that’s what these campaigns are about) to a range of tools useful for analysing web site and domain name trends.

Today is the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) awareness day.  It’s a day when the Internet community and others come together to raise awareness of the IWF and the work they do to minimise the availability of illegal content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

They are reporting latest research which indicates that over three quarters (77%) of UK adult internet users who have stumbled across images of children being sexually abused are unsure how to report them. In addition, 71% of those surveyed ranked the availability of online child sexual abuse images as their top concern about the internet.

We support the IWF and wish them continued success with their awareness raising.

I was at the Centr meeting recently where a representative of JPRS, the registry for .jp (Japan) gave a presentation on the increased usage of search boxes in advertising in Japan instead of a URL.  Apparently some recent research showed that more than 35% of adverts in Japan carry an image of a search box with the appropriate search terms in the place of a URL.

I’ve started to notice advertisers occasionally doing something similar in the UK.  Here they tend to use the words “Search for” and then whatever the term is.

I guess that the advertisers are either very confident that their sites will come up as the number one on the list of responses, or they have an arrangement with the search companies to ensure it does.  There does seem to be some suggestion that this may be the case.

One of the key reasons for this practice in Japan, would appear to be that this gets around the issue of the requirement for URLs in Japan to contain both the local Japanese script characters and the latin characters .jp.  Maybe once IDNs are introduced at the root this trend will reverse?

It’s an interesting trend and we shall be monitoring whether this takes off in greater numbers here, and ultimately its impact on the domain name market.

Last week we were pleased to note that our Director of Legal and Policy, Emily Taylor had her membership of the Internet Governance Forum’s Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group renewed.The United Nations IGF is a multi-stakeholder forum that debates a range of issues relating to Internet Governance. The IGF works with all stakeholders to create a safe, fair and inclusive Internet experience.  The role of the Advisory Group is to advise the UN Secretary General on the agenda and it’s made up from people from government, industry, civil society from all around the world.

As part of a regular review, about a third of the group’s membership has been rotated and Emily is pleased to be amongst those who have been retained.

The main task of the group is to provide advice on the preparations for the next meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from 3 to 6 December.

Each member of the group serves in a personal capacity, but they are expected to have extensive interaction with our respective stakeholder groups. Emily has played an integral role in the creation of a UK IGF, and she believes that national IGFs are vital to the future development and success of the IGF as a whole, helping to turn the IGF from a ‘talking shop’ into a ‘thinktank’.

The success of this work in the UK has led to other opportunities and Nominet is collaborating with others, including the French and Brazilian governments, to present workshops showcasing the UK IGF experience, and the Best Practice Challenge in Hyderabad.

We look forward to supporting these efforts, with initiatives such as the Nominet Best Practice Challenge, which showcases examples of best practice in Internet Governance by organisations and individuals in the UK.

We were involved in the recent launch of the UK Internet Governance Forum at an event in Parliament attended by over 100 people from industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society. The launch event featured a report from the Internet Governance Forum in Rio last November; a plan of action up until the next IGF meeting in India and beyond; the launch of Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge 2008 and a debate on the future of the Internet.

The UK Internet Governance Forum is a collaborative partnership between Nominet, the UK Department for Business and key parliamentarians. Its aim is to provide a local forum in the UK to engage industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society in debate on Internet Governance issues, stimulating partnerships and coalitions to deliver solutions and demonstrating best practice for others to learn from.

Other influential stakeholder groups that are taking part include the London Internet Exchange, the Coalition on Internet Safety and Amnesty International.

One of the key messages to emerge from the first UK IGF meeting is that the UK is taking a leading role in Internet governance, and that other countries are seeing what we are doing and beginning to start running their own processes at the national level. Brazil, France and Finland are among the first countries to follow the UK’s ‘best practice’ model. The UK is proving to the rest of the world that the Internet Governance Forum works, as a collaborative partnership between Government, business, civil society and academia, because it is not subject to Government legislation and is free from bureaucracy.

The UK IGF will concentrate on developing examples of UK best practice and serve as a potential prototype model for other national IGFs. Rt Hon Alun Michael MP commented that Tanya Byron’s recent review of the online child protection sphere has highlighted successful partnership initiatives in that area, particularly between the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit. They have successfully combined resources and expertise from law enforcement, Industry and the third sector, while working closely with the Home Office’s Online Child Protection Task Force.

This kind of precedent paves the way for a cooperative template to be applied in the field of Internet governance. The key projects for the UK IGF going forwards will be to explore UK concerns around the IGF themes of security, diversity, access and openness at a seminar in May, and then to identify the UK’s best practice agenda for the IGF in Hydrabad at the awards ceremony for Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge in July.

We would encourage UK companies and organisations to send us their entries – the closing date is 25 April 2008. Winning entries will be announced at an awards ceremony in July 2008 and invited to a leading role in the UK preparatory meeting for the Internet Governance Forum meeting in India.

News that a company has recently paid a record £560,000 for the domain name cruises.co.uk indicates that the secondary market for .uk domain names is still strong.

Cruise.co.uk decided to pay the large sum to a German travel company for the plural version of the domain name in order to improve their chances of being the first port of call for web users searching for cruise holidays.

What’s interesting is that being the registrant of cruise.co.uk, the purchaser has a clear idea of the potential value of the domain name to their business. They were therefore in a good position to determine what was a fair price as opposed to speculating about potential future revenues.

It should also be noted, of course, that we can’t be sure whether this is actually the highest price paid for a .co.uk domain name, as private sales happen regularly and not everyone is as open as this about how much they have paid.

Yesterday ICANN announced that they are proposing to remove their five-day ‘Add Grace Period’ which previously allowed registrars to rectify errors when registering new domain names without cost. Due to serial abuse of this facility by speculators testing the profitability of domain names through advertising revenues, ICANN will instead debit the payment as soon as the domain name is registered.

Although this change will clearly deter tasters from registering high volumes of domains speculatively, it will also make the process of registering less flexible for registrars. It remains to be seen exactly how the new process will work, but it is probably safe to assume that if the registrar has to pay these costs upfront they will ultimately be passed to their customers.

When we took steps against domain tasting in August 2006, we decided to introduce limits on the number of domains a registrar could delete. Our limit for deletions to rectify spelling errors etc is five domains or 5% of the total number of domains registered but not yet invoiced (whichever is higher) but the limit for practices such as domain tasting is zero, and the limits form part of our registrar agreement, the formal contract that all our registrars sign up to. We believe this solution is neater, as it effectively counters the practice of domain tasting but at the same time allows some flexibility for registrars where genuine errors have occurred.

In a separate move, Google announced last week that they will start to monitor domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within the current five-day grace period, and exclude them from their AdSense program. Such a move would clearly strike at the heart of the problem. If tasters stop receiving revenues for pay-per-click ads associated with the domains they are testing, they will soon stop trying.

Both proposals have their merits, and it is encouraging to see that concerted efforts are being made from various sectors within the industry that could herald the beginning of the end of this practice.

Following the announcement in November from auDA, the Australian registry, of its one millionth .au domain name, it was pleasing to note this week that the French registry, AFNIC, has passed the one million mark on its register. They have been experiencing strong growth since liberalisation of their registration criteria. It is also further evidence of the growing popularity and increased usage of country code domain names.