insight 

I was delighted to recently welcome to Nominet Roelof Meijer, CEO of SIDN the registry for .nl, as part of a job swap auction for our senior management we held last year to raise money for our chosen charity.As we shared ideas and experiences it was quite fascinating to discuss the fact that our respective registries have many similarities. We are both running country code Top Level Domain registries that are experiencing continued growth and we are both working hard to improve our systems and services. SIDN have also won the contract to run the registry for ENUM within the Netherlands, as we have for the UK. For both organisations this represents a significant opportunity to diversify from our core businesses of running country code Top Level Domain registries. Both registries are also taking more of a leading role internationally. This is in order to share best practices and experiences, but also to ensure that the interests of our local Internet communities are taken into account in international discussions.

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.

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.

On Wednesday last week, we launched our domain name industry report at our first .uk registrar conference. This seems to have been well received by all in attendance and has got a couple of mentions in the media.

Some, though by no means all, of the content was already in the public domain. The challenge for us was to bring together a large amount of disparate information and present an overview picture of the .uk domain name industry within a global context, including some previously unpublished statistics (.uk renewals, registrant and registrar trends).

Since presenting this information, we’ve had some requests for other data to be presented in the future and are already investigating various strands of research. We’d like to know what you think of the report and what other data you’d be interested in seeing us produce. So if there’s data you think we’re in a position to obtain and publish, then please ask and we’ll see if it’s possible to get at it.

The conference itself was also a first for us. We wanted to present a day that would be of interest to our registrars, increase the understanding of the various issues that we are all faced with in the market at the moment and impart some of the latest information about how we’re trying to support our registrar community. Judging by the feedback on the day, we seem to have hit the mark for most people.

If you were there and feel we could have done better then, let us know how and we’ll bear it in mind for future events.

If you weren’t there and want to know what happened then take a look at the presentation slides here.

The US Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently announced the renewal of a contract with Neustar to manage the .us domain name space. Read more

Earlier this month isnic, the .is Icelandic registry, relaxed its rules for overseas registrants.

“Foreign registrants of .IS domains have until now been required to confirm their ownership of the corresponding trademark at the Icelandic Patent Agency (Einkaleyfastofa) before the domain can be registered. This requirement has now been lifted. Read more