Competition to ICANN?

["Bala Pillai (Sydney)" <bala@apic.net>]

Friends,

Re: below - Do you think this will get ICANN to speed up?

cheers../bala
Bala Pillai
The Asia Pacific Internet Company http://www.apic.net
"Networking Minds in Halls Without Walls since 1995"

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27263,00.html

New Domain Names to Hit Europe
By James Ledbetter - European Executive Editor
Jun 19 2001 05:26 AM PDT

California-based new.net isn't prepared to wait for ICANN to come up with
new domain name endings.

Write the author:
. James Ledbetter - European Executive Editor

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

UPDATE Have you been hotly awaiting the chance to give your European
business a Web address ending in ".golf"? Starting this week, you should be
able to.
New.net, a California-based domain registry firm, today announced that it
will make available ten new domain extensions to help Web sites describe
their function more precisely. The ten extensions are: .arts, .school,
.church., .love, .golf, .auction, .agent, .llp, .llc, and .scifi.

These extensions are not - like the veteran .com, .net, or .org Extensions -
approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Rather, new.net uses routing software to divert Web surfers who type in the
new domain and switches them to a New.net server.

So, for example, visitors to a Web site called cantbuyme.love would actually
be diverted to cantbuyme.love.new.net. The routing software can be provided
through an ISP, or downloaded by individual users via the New.net site.

The company said the address extensions would be available later this week.
Oddly, though the extensions are targeted toward Europe, they are priced in
US currency, at $25 per year.

Earlier this year, New.net released 20 such renegade domain extensions,
including .xxx, .hola, .mp3, and .gmbh. The company declined to release a
figure for how many such domains it has sold, but said it was in the tens of
thousands.

Steve Chadima, new.net's chief marketing officer, told The Standard he had
predicted that .xxx would be the firm's best-selling extension. "It sells,"
he said, "but not as well as .inc and .shop."

Chadima said that New.net's technique would allow it to begin selling
multilingual domain extensions, even using non-Western characters; he said
the company would begin offering those before the end of 2001.

The firm acknowledges that it could run into conflict if ICANN decides to
release one of its extensions (such as .llp) as a new top-level domain.
"That's the bet we're taking," says Chadima. He argues that while ICANN is
well positioned to make technical decisions about the Net, "the subject of
which domain names get to be used is a political and economic question that
ICANN is ill-equipped to deal with."

Given how slowly ICANN moves to issue new top-level domains, New.net is
betting that it will have an advantage with any given extension. "If that
happens, by the time that happens," Chadima says, "we'll have tens of
millions of viewers and tens of thousands of site. They will be the collider
at that point."





* APPLe: To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe" to apple-request@apnic.net *