News
Go Daddy Set to Hit 40 Million Domains Milestone on Wednesday
Go Daddy set to hit another milestone.
About six months after crossing the 30 million domain name mark, The Go Daddy Group is set to surpass 40 million domains under management, most likely on Wednesday. So if you register a domain name tomorrow, you might get some extra notoriety if you time it just right.
Ten years ago there were only about 17 million domain names registered, and now there is a single registrar with more than twice that many domains under management. When you do the math, it’s no surprise the company grossed about $750 million last year.
It was on March 10, 2000, coincidentally the same day Go Daddy is likely to hit 40 million domains under management, that the .com bubble is generally thought of to have “burst”, with the NASDAQ topping out at 5132.52. In the period that followed, many people and companies let their domain names expire. It was during this time that the domain name gold rush caught its second wind.
Network Solutions was the biggest registrar at the time. Ten years later it has only about 6.5 million domain names under its umbrella.
Given the role Go Daddy played in bringing domain names to the mass market, I’m somewhat surprised it wasn’t nominated to The .Com 25. But rather than look at the past, I’m sure the company has its eyes on a bigger milestone: 50 million domains under management. At this pace, it could hit that number later this year.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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.Org Eyes Leadership Role in IDN Top Level Domain Names
.Org registry PIR wants to bring best practices to IDN top level domain names.
One of the big questions facing registries of existing top level domain names is how they should pursue Internationalized Domain Name “equivalents” of their domain names when they become available. These so-called IDN.IDN domain names will be available once new gTLDs — such as .nyc and .music — come out.
Last month we learned more about VeriSign’s plans for .com and .net; today I reached out to Lance Wolak, Director of Marketing & Product Management for Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages .org.
PIR hopes to take a leading role in IDN top level domain names, as it has in other initiatives such as DNSSEC.
“We’re not primarily commercially driven in what we do,” explained Wolak. “We’re really driven to do what helps and protects the domain name registrant.”
When it comes to IDN top level domain names, PIR wants to show support for various communities.
“We’re doing this in the public interest and to show our support and respect for the different language communities,” said Wolak. “Idn.idn is a technology that we want to see move forward.”
IDN.org domain names, with the standard .org at the end, have been available in many languages since the middle of the last decade. Wolak said that many of these have been registered for search engine optimization purposes (i.e., exact match to what the searcher types in his or her language/script).
Wolak said it would be premature for PIR to give definite plans for .org-as-IDN domains, given that new TLD guidelines aren’t finalized yet.
“Right now we are watching the information that’s coming out of ICANN, and looking over the Draft Applicant Guidebook,” said Wolak. “Until that is finalized, we won’t have a hundred percent picture of the requirements to launch a new gTLD, which would include IDN TLDs. So we don’t have anything to announce on how many scripts we’ll go after, which ones, etc.”
Wolak noted that, in addition to Chinese script, Cyrillic and Arabic, PIR is looking at other popular scripts that have large populations behind them. Script tables are currently being developed for some scripts sets, including Arabic. PIR has been working with the community as it develops the tables. In addition to settling the tables, there are other issues for IDN TLDs that need to be worked out, such as current getting them to work with email systems.
There are still a number of open issues for IDN TLDs. But regardless of how they develop, PIR wants to be a thought leader.
“We want to take the approach that we can bring the best practices with what we’re doing in the .org space to a new IDN TLD,” said Wolak.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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ICANN to Reconsider the .XXX Decision on March 12
ICANN had previously given the domain the go ahead in 2005, but reversed the decision two years later amidst protests from US conservative groups. An independent review recently concluded that decision was unfair and that the plan should be reconsidered.
Read full story: BBC
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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Top-Level Domains
Guagua.com Sells for $100k, Pepe.com Sells Again
Guagua.com hits six figures, Domaining.com owner scores nice sale.
Sedo has sold the domain name Guagua.com for $100,000. Guagua has a number of different meanings, including being the name of a language and a municipality in the Phillipines.
The company also helped broker the sale of Pepe.com for 45,000 EUR. It looks like Francois Carrillo of Domaining.com scored a nice flip on this domain name. He bought it at Bido.com a couple months ago for only $15,000, and then listed it for sale on his Mocus.com domain listing site. Sedo brought a buyer to the table, helping Carrillo score about four times his money in just a couple months.
Here are other notable sales for the week from Sedo:
.COM
gastronomie.com 35,000 EUR
telemar.com 12,000 EUR
xtrader.com 10,000 USD
afx.com 8,100 USD
mallchina.com 6,000 EUR
buffalogroup.com 5,432 USD
cosmetiques.com 5,150 USD
okta.com 5,100 USD
bookmate.com 5,000 EUR
jpsports.com 5,000 USD
qualcos.com 5,000 USD
landingpagedesign.com 5,000 GBP
stayfair.com 5,000 USD
tridien.com 5,000 USD
ccTLD
risultati.it 32,000 EUR
energieagentur.de 21,500 EUR
escortservice.de 16,660 EUR
transpower.nl 15,500 EUR
ioffer.co.uk 11,500 USD
jb.de 9,500 EUR
stelle.it 8,000 EUR
shirts.co.za 8,000 USD
73.de 7,500 EUR
87.de 7,500 EUR
call.at 6,750 EUR
drucker-toner.de 6,500 EUR
carworld.eu 6,000 EUR
designshop.ch 6,000 EUR
luxury.co.za 6,000 USD
tmb.de 5,950 EUR
healing.de 5,950 EUR
mamme.it 5,900 USD
xa.de 5,700 EUR
hurghada.ch 5,000 EUR
Other
sys.net 12,500 USD
open.org 6,200 USD
analytics.info 5,000 USD
docs.net 5,000 USD
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Happy 5th Birthday, Domain Name Wire
Domain Name Wire started publishing five years ago today.
On March 9, 2005, I wrote the first post on Domain Name Wire, reporting on the sale of Local.com for $700,000. 3,141 posts later, Domain Name Wire is running as strong as ever.
If you’re reading this, I’d like to thank you for making Domain Name Wire a premier news source for the domain industry. It’s because of your readership that I commit my time reporting on and analyzing this exciting industry.
Of course, that’s all possible thanks to DNW’s many advertisers. Please take a moment to peruse the ads on this page. If you haven’t visited any of the advertisers, please take a moment to do so.
A lot has changed in the past five years. Looking back at what I wrote in March 2005 is like a time capsule:
TrafficClub now open to public – Moniker launched one of the first major “traffic splitting” systems for domain parking, which closed down after upstream providers limited the practice and Oversee.net eventually bought Moniker.
Go Daddy launches radio show – Bob Parsons revved up the publicity act. I was later a guest on the show.
Yahoo to challenge Google Adsense – “Challenge” was probably too strong of a word. Yahoo Publisher Network is still in beta, five years later.
MSN readies pay-per-click system – Microsoft announced its Adcenter program. Fast forward to 2010, Adcenter will soon be the management platform for PPC ads on both Microsoft and Yahoo.
Thanks again for reading DNW over the past five years. If you haven’t yet done so, please subscribe to the DNW RSS feed and follow it on Twitter.
Here’s to the next five years.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Scenes from ICANN Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya
ICANN meeting in Nairobi running well, report attendees.
With all of the hype around security and possible disruptions, those in attendance at ICANN’s meeting in Nairobi say all is going well.
Attorney John Berryhill writes “The summit and the ICANN meeting are both running smoothly here. The “security issue” is waaaay overblown by those who simply didn’t want the meeting held in Kenya. The conference center is huge and in a secure block with Kenyan military around the perimeter…”
Berryhill surmises that it’s probably safer than Philadelphia.
Berryhill sent this picture from the room of the conference center in Kenya. He said the buses enter a secure gate and then all guests go through a second perimeter. The conference center is huge, and there were no difficulties with the African leadership summit.
Reports on Twitter show that ICANN leadership is actually making progress on issues at this meeting, holding various groups accountable rather than letting them just delay progress.
Here’s a picture of the Mount Kilimanjaro climbers arriving at the Nairobi conference:
Finally, a little humor for you. A celebrity guest interrupted the ICANN meeting today:
Notice the tattoo on Kayne West’s forearm.
Thanks John for keeping us all up to date.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Sex.com Domain Name In Default for Over a Year
Debtors behind on bills for the past year.
With Sex.com heading to the auction block, there’s a been a lot of talk about what went wrong with the current owner, Escom LLC. According to a Reuters article, Escom has been in default on its loan for over a year to lender DOM Partners.
“The loan was in default and DOM partners is foreclosing pursuant to its right under the security agreement,” DOM’s attorney Scott Matthews told Reuters.
The auction is still scheduled for March 18. Clearly, there are some disagreements amongst Escom LLC investors. There was early indication from one of the investors that there might be a lawsuit filed to block the auction, but a search of Federal District Court records did not turn up any such suit yet.
Auctioneer Maltz Auctions says there’s been significant interest in the domain name. Prospective bidders need to deposit a $1 million check prior to the auction. There will definitely be bids in excess of $1 million, but any winning bid is subject to DOM Partners’ acceptance.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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ICA Requests Action on Czech Arbitration Court Policy Changes
Internet Commerce Association wants ICANN to act quickly on move by UDRP provider.
Internet Commerce Association counsel Philip Corwin has sent a letter (pdf) to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom and Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate-Thrush asking it to act on Czech Arbitration Court’s new UDRP policy.
Czech Arbitration Court (CAC), one of the newest UDRP providers, proposed a new scheme in which it would charge only 500 EUR to file a domain name complaint and arbitrators would not spend as much time on cases.
ICANN held a public comment period on the proposal, in which all 15 comments were opposed to CAC’s scheme. That includes comments from an existing arbitrator who questioned the basis for the proposal.
Counsel for CAC posted a comment on Domain Name Wire’s earlier story on the proposal, stating that it would not move forward without ICANN’s blessing. Instead, before getting final word from ICANN, CAC made a few changes to the proposal and announced it was going forward with our without ICANN’s approval.
So far, ICANN has not made any public comment on CAC’s move that I’m aware of. It was briefly discussed in another context on the first day of ICANN’s meeting in Nariobi.
Whether ICANN acts on CAC’s move or not, it needs to say something.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Amazon.com Fires Colorado Affiliates Thanks to Affiliate Tax
Amazon says “see you later” to Colorado’s affiliate merchants. Thank inept state representatives.
Colorado is the latest state to exacerbate unemployment problems by effectively canning its affiliate marketers.
Colorado has joined a list of states that either proposed or enacted rules that make web companies collect sale tax if they have affiliates operating in the state. In the case of Colorado, HB 10-1193 didn’t necessarily require Amazon.com to collect sales tax. Instead, it upped the compliance burden on Amazon.com, making it just as costly.
As I’ve pointed out before, such “affiliate taxes” actually lower a state’s tax revenue. The e-commerce merchant usually cuts the state’s affiliates rather than deal with the sales tax. So the state doesn’t end up getting the sales tax. Also, it lowers the income of the state’s affiliate marketers, lowering state income tax revenues.
(Hat tip Bruno Falconi)
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Domain Companies Head to Austin for SXSW
Domain companies en route to Austin later this week.
Several domain name companies are heading to Austin later this week for the start of the annual South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Festival. The Interactive portion of the event attracted over 10,000 attendees last year. Many stay in town for the music festival, which kicks off in the middle of next week. Although the interactive festival is big, music is a big draw: over 2,000 musical acts will play at 80 official venues next week, and many more unofficially.
So here’s who I know will be in town for SXSW 2010:
DirectNIC – domain registrar will have a booth at the Interactive trade show. Swing by booth 932 to say ‘hi’.
Name.com – will be at the show
Demand Media – the company has a big contingent in Austin, thanks to its acquisition of Pluck
Traverse Legal – one of the attorneys at Traverse Legal, which handles a number of domain name cases, will be here
If you’re with a domain name company and heading to Austin for SXSW, feel free to leave a comment.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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ICANN CEO Urges African Telcos to Shatter Monopolies
ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, urges African leaders to "shatter" telecommunications monopolies in their nations in order to help lower the price of Internet access to their citizens during his opening remarks at the start of the 37th ICANN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Beckstrom noted that while 15 percent of the world's population lives in Africa, Africans make up less than 7 percent of all Internet users.
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More under: Access Providers, ICANN, Policy & Regulation, Telecom
WWW Prefix Typo Popular Among Trademark Infringers
Study says WWW typo is most common prefix in trademark infringing domain names.
A new study from Corporation Service Company (CSC) — which provides trademark protection services — shows that www is the most common prefix to brand names used to “trademark infringers” in domain names. (The very common typo where someone forgets the dot between www and the domain name.)
Perhaps more interesting is that most companies that do own the www typo of their web site don’t actually forward it to their main web site. 67% of the www typos owned by the actual web site owner didn’t point to any active web site. 80% of the www typos owned by someone other than the web site owner pointed to pay-per-click pages.
CSC says the www typo of its own web site gets about 1% of the traffic of its web site.
CSC determined that the most common suffix added to trademarks is “online”. Surprisingly, the common “com” typo where someone forgets to enter a dot between the second level domain and ‘com’ is only ranked #5.
The study looked at 100 randomly selected brands as well as all filed UDRP cases.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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ICANN Meeting in Nairobi Begins Despite Security Concerns
After a series of board meetings on whether to cancel or not due to security issues, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting kicked off in Nairobi. The meeting was overshadowed by security concerns and some ICANN members reportedly boycotted the meeting, choosing to hold parallel sessions in New York and Washington, D.C., instead of risking coming to Nairobi.
Read full story: Computerworld
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ICANN Chair: May be “Ready to Move” on Uniform Rapid Suspension
ICANN session on trademark protection suggests URS is close to being finalized.
Of all of the trademark protections being discussed for the launch of new top level domain names, it looks like Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) may be the closest to being approved. Uniform Rapid Suspension is a sort of “light UDRP” for domain names deemed to be clear cut cases of cybersquatting.
During the first day of sessions at ICANN’s Nairobi meeting, ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Tengate-Thrush commented that the URS proposal may be close to approval:
I just wanted to warn the community that there’s a real danger of this mechanism actually having been agreed and the board voting on it and us moving on.
The silence that was the response to Mary’s outline and the fact that Robin can only find one quibble, which she then provided the answer to, suggests that we really are getting close on this one. And I think the evidence of compromise that’s all over there is another great sign.
So just a warning. We may actually be ready to move on this one.
In other words, speak now or forever hold your peace.
Although there wasn’t much debate at the ICANN meeting on URS, there’s still an open comment period on the topic.
As it stands, URS has been greatly watered down from the original proposal. A complainant doesn’t get rights to a domain name won through URS, it merely gets suspended. Which means that, once it expires, someone else will register it. (There was some discussion during the session of giving priority rights to the complainant upon expiration of the domain name. If this is added, it would basically make URS into a cheap UDRP with delayed gratification.)
Also during the discussion on URS, the issue of UDRP providers offering their own similar forms of URS came up. Czech Arbitration Court is offering a watered down version of UDRP starting March 15 (something ICANN still hasn’t commented on). WIPO also has plans, but they seem to still be in the exploration phase.
A person identified as “Brian from WIPO” in the ICANN session transcript stated:
It’s true we have been exploring ways to further expedite and make more cost-efficient the UDRP within the existing framework based on the ability to address issues such as word limits and fees in the supplemental rules. And we very much think it’s an open question, and I agree you with there that there are questions regarding the scope of interoperability between any URS and any efficiency gains that can be made within the UDRP process.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Reevaluating New Top Level Domain Names
A look back at my position on new TLDs, 9 months later.
Last May I wrote an editorial titled “Why I’m opposed to new top level domains”. I outlined six reasons that I didn’t like the current proposal for new top level domain names.
Nine months later, I still have many of those same concerns. But I’m also looking forward to the introduction of new top level domain names. Look, everyone who’s pushing for new TLDs is in it for the money. And there’s money to be made, so rather than just fight it I’m also looking at how to play the game to my benefit. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that several large domain investors plan to launch new TLDs.
So let’s take another look at the six concerns I wrote about last May.
1. Consumer confusion will lead to an unsafe internet. It’s a given that new TLDs will create confusion for the typical web user. Just ask Michael Berkens. But the concern about it leading to an unsafe internet is probably not rational, given that the typical web user already gets duped by plenty of scams. The marginal effect of adding new TLDs is probably low.
2. ICANN will lose its path. This is still a concern for me. But at least now ICANN has a quality leader.
3. Politics will play a bigger role in the Net. In the nine months since I wrote the original piece, it has become more and more clear that this is a big issue. Governments are staking their claim and trying to get the leg up on new TLDs while pushing their view of what should be allowed on the web.
4. Registries will fail, leaving customers in a lurch. Yes, this will happen. And ICANN will get egg on its face after the first few fail and it works out kinks in its registry failover plan.
5. Large registrars will become too powerful, harming competition. This is still an issue, but it doesn’t really affect most of us. The registries have the most to lose here.
6. Fundamental changes to domain name regulation will be pushed through without proper controls. This remains one of the biggest problems with new TLDs. It’s not the concept itself, it’s how things are being done. No longer is the goal of a registry to offer the lowest priced, best service to customers. No longer will we have a “uniform” dispute resolution policy. These changes are being hammered through in an effort to get new TLDs out the door.
To summarize, I still have grave concerns about what is being “packaged” with new TLDs and the possible damage it could do to the web. But I also don’t want to sit back and let opportunity pass by.
Now, I’m not going to be one of those people that ignores the downside to introducing new TLDs. There are plenty, and I’ll continue to point them out. After all, it makes for compelling copy.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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A Little Flexibility from ICANN and We Might Just Get IDNs… for Everyone
Nobody doubts that some time in the near future there will be Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in Chinese, Russian or Arabic scripts. The Chinese, Russian and Arabic-character-using worlds are large—encompassing hundreds of millions of current and potential users. They are politically influential blocs, with the ability to demand action in international meetings. And perhaps most importantly, they are—at least when taken together—rich. Everybody knows that access on the web in these languages is not a matter of if, but simply a question of when…
But what about the poorer nations of the world that use scripts other than the largest IDNs and the typical Latin character set currently available on the net? What about Amharic, or Georgian, Azeri or Thai, Burmese or Cambodian? Doesn't the internet community have a goal of reaching out to them in their own languages too? The answer is yes, but I fear that despite the rhetoric, some of ICANN's policies may actually end up creating disincentives for companies wishing to fully build out the IDN space.
To listen to the words of Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new-ish leader, the community's goal is to help make the internet available to anyone in their own language—and in their own character set or script. And, as we heard during the Seoul ICANN meeting last year—there was actually a celebratory cocktail to usher in the new IDN age—IDNs are the future. Still, work on Chinese, Korean and the like is only the beginning. There are dozens of scripts out there.
However, there is potentially a real flaw in ICANN's planning that threatens to upend this vision of universal IDN access, effectively leaving some scripts "out in the cold". Under ICANN's new gTLD implementation plan as presently proposed, registries operating existing gTLDs (or those hoping to operate new ones) will be required to apply for each IDN version separately… and pay full fees for each one. This directly impacts the go/no go decision for registry operators who need to make a reasonable "business case" for each script that they apply for, in order to justify the high application costs. And, while these costs might seem trivial for gTLDs in, say, Chinese or Arabic, this policy pretty much ensures that registry operators (new or old) will leave some scripts undeveloped.
The likely upshot is that the gTLD revolution going on around the world will bypass Georgian, Burmese, and Amharic entirely… furthering the digital divide.
There may be a solution, if ICANN has the flexibility to adjust its policies. Many of the evaluation costs in the new gTLD process are duplicated. As just one example, if a potential registry operator applies for multiple gTLDs, it is likely that most technical qualifications will only have to be evaluated once. This would lower ICANN's evaluation costs, and should lead to reduced application costs as well, leading to more competition for (and interest in) smaller scripts. And there may be other ways to lower the barriers to entry so that companies large and small will be able to make the business case for a truly, fully IDN-friendly internet.
At every ICANN and Internet Governance Forum meeting we hear about the need to make the internet an equal- (or at least more equal-) access platform, one that respects language and culture diversity. Lowering the costs for companies wanting to provide IDN access in less popular scripts is one obvious, tangible way to make this happen. A little flexibility could go a long way to providing a real internet future for the millions that speak and write Armenian or Burmese or a host of other languages.
Written by Andrew Mack, Principal at AMGlobal Consulting
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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Multilinguism, Top-Level Domains, Web
OTT Threat to Telco's Middleware Opportunities
I recently participated in two Comverse events, and once again the message was driven home to me about the enormous opportunities that lie ahead of the industry in the field of new telecoms applications.
The middleware and cloud applications that are now appearing at the edge of the network will of course, be further developed once high-speed broadband becomes available, but already they are having an enormous impact on the telecoms market. The new user experiences that can be obtainable through these applications will enrich fast broadband networks beyond recognition.
What we now have is, on the one hand, the Over-The-Top (OTT) applications that have conquered the world thanks to companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, YouTube and so on; and, on the other, the attempts by the telcos to develop these apps though their broadband and mobile portals.
By using the OTT route one can avoid many of the problems that the telco industry has been dealing with for decades. I remember as far back as the early 1990s, when both Telstra and Optus launched their impressive new billing reforms; but today, more than twenty years later, their billing and operational support systems (BSS/OSS) are as far from completion as they were in the 1990s. In fact it is likely that they are even further behind now, since many new applications have become available since that time—applications that are making those telco systems look like dinosaurs. In the mobile market we can also refer to decade old failed strategy of introducing IMS.
While fast broadband is the essential infrastructure of the digital economy the real action will take place on the layer above the infrastructure. This is where for many years I have envisaged the future of the telcos—facilitating the development of the digital economy, rather than concentrating on end-user products like telephone calls, mobile portals or broadband applications.
This is the world of value-added infrastructure, middleware and cloud services. However the old infrastructure with its legacy of BSS and OSS systems has failed to make the transition to the new Internet-based ICT infrastructure, let alone being able to facilitate Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 services.
In the meantime it is the new digital media companies that are building not national but international middleware networks. While telcos fail to service customer bases that consist of millions of users the digital media companies are able to serve hundreds of millions of customers.
Therefore NBNs could be a godsend, since this will, potentially at least, give telcos the opportunity to build a value-added layer on top of the infrastructure that will be capable of delivering Next Generation Network (NGN) service such as Web 3.0+ services.
However, while the digital media companies are progressing in this field on a monthly basis, telcos still measure their progress in years, so at present the gap is still growing, but not in favour of the telcos.
So the sooner the telcos start their transformation the better.
However, after well over a decade of calling for change time is now running out. They have now also lost the mobile portal battle against the apps market (that happened so fast they never knew what hit them). If the telcos miss this last opportunity it is indeed highly likely that they will be relegated to being basic infrastructure operators—and that market is also under threat as construction companies are better-positioned to do this job after most telcos went out of this business one or two decades ago.
On a more positive note, while customers might not like their dinosaur telcos they do, at the same time, trust them. They have built robust systems with enormous reliability and sound security based on proper standards and availability everywhere.
So the telcos could use this advantage to offer that same level of trust in an Internet world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to know who is trustworthy and who is not. I have made this argument for many years, trying to get the telcos to move. Again, the opportunity is still there—but for how long?
Banks are in a similar position, but they have far more valuable data they can use to help customers navigate the digital economy. So they could easily compete in this market as well. Customer knowledge is the key element of the digital economy.
However, more immediate competition is coming from the social media sites, which are quickly becoming the new powerhouses of the digital economy; also, they already have far more information about their customers and can use this to expand their services.
So it is two minutes to twelve for the telcos here as well.
Looking at some of those fantastic applications from Comverse we see a range of enriched voice and messaging services with superior user experience, complete with visualisation, personalisation, location, multi-channel applications and an openness to social networks, UGC-sites and RSS feeds.
I can see the digital media companies offering these communications applications immediately, but the telcos may not move so fast. This would hurt the telcos right at the very core of their communications business and I can now quite easily see these products being offered by companies other than the telcos.
Some of the mobile companies are better-positioned than the fixed operators; however if we look at the mobile portals market versus the applications market we see that the mobile operators also have largely failed to make the transition to the new open web-based world.
Perhaps the telcos should start looking more at OTT services themselves. There are great applications with unified communication applications in relation to social sites, location-based activities, etc. If the telcos were smart they could offer voice free and allow customers to choose from a whole range of value-added voice services and to make incremental changes to the applications they really value.
Over and again I have argued that, rather than concentrating on their retail customers, the telcos should supply their middleware and cloud services to the content and services providers. They should be the key providers to the organisations that are going to drive the digital economy.
Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication
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More under: Broadband, Cloud Computing, Data Center, Telecom
Peculiar UDRPs: Recent.net, Than.net, They.net
UDRP filing goes after three highly generic .net domain names.
Here’s a domain name dispute filing that must be complicated: someone has filed a UDRP for Recent.net, Than.net, and They.net. The dispute was filed with National Arbitration Forum, which does not disclose the complainant’s identity until a decision is rendered.
On the face of it, these seem like very generic domain names. But when you dig into the whois history, you notice similarities with all of the domain names.
-currently registered to “Skelton Logic” in Australia
-previous registrant Vonny Ling of Singapore in January 2010
-several whois registrant changes in 2009 that are the same for each domain name
On the outset, it looks like it might be a case of someone using UDRP to challenge a domain theft. Several companies have used UDRP when their three character domain names were stolen, and panelists have granted the domain names given the circumstances.
But using UDRP to get three very generic domain names will prove extremely challenging. The complainant will have to prove some sort of trademark rights in the terms recent, they and than. That will be quite difficult. Unless the details are surprising, this seems like a case that will more likely need to be settled in court rather than UDRP.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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LTE and Spectrum Stupidity
Mobile operators are counting on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology to handle surging demand for mobile data access. But LTE developers made some poor choices, cutting spectral efficiency and thus driving up operator costs.
LTE was envisioned as an all IP system, but the RF allocations follow the voice-centric approach of earlier generations. While LTE standards allow for either Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) or Time Division Duplexing (TDD), all initial LTE equipment uses FDD. FDD requires two separate blocks of spectrum—one for each direction. FDD makes perfect sense for bi-directional voice traffic. It makes no sense for data. With the exception of peer-to-peer file sharing (which most mobile operators block), data traffic is very asymmetric. Sending data via FDD means one block of spectrum is fully utilized and the other, equal sized block, is dramatically under utilized. Result: the operator pays for almost twice the spectrum they actually use.
Verizon is deploying LTE in the 700 MHz C block which means they are using 746 MHz to 756 MHz (a 10 MHz channel) for their downlink (to the mobile device) and wasting most of 777 MHz to 787 MHz (another 10 MHz channel) for the uplink. If Verizon could deploy TDD (as used by WiMAX and as defined for LTE but not implemented), they could fully utilize both 10 MHz blocks for data transfers, almost doubling their data capacity.
I don't know the actual capacity Verizon will realize on average with their first generation LTE infrastructure. But suppose Peter Rysavy is correct (as implied by Gigaom) that Verizon will initially average 15 Mbps per 10 MHz channel. That's 15/15 Mbps, symmetric, even though average traffic is likely to be 15/2 Mbps. No single user is likely to see 15 Mbps; rather that 15 Mbps is shared among all users in that sector. With TDD (the default for WiMAX and an unimplemented option for LTE), the Verizon spectrum could support two channels of perhaps 13/2 Mbps each in that same sector. Again, no single user will see 13 Mbps, but all the users in the cell will be sharing 30 Mbps of capacity that can be dynamically divided between up and down—mostly like averaging 26/4 Mbps but able to allocate 15/15 or 28/2 as the traffic mix changes.
It's ironic the LTE implementors got this wrong when you consider their decision to use only IP in the rest of the LTE design, thereby dropping support for traditional voice or SMS services. That's right, initial LTE deployments won't support voice telephony or SMS messages, only data services, and yet LTE spectrum assignments were made as if voice comes first.
That's ironic.
Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at Ashtonbrooke; Chief Strategy Officer at Dialogic
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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Mobile, Telecom, Wireless
Are Portable Email Addresses Possible?
News reports say that the Israeli government is close to passing a law that requires portable e-mail addresses, similar to portable phone numbers. Number portability has been a success, making it much easier to switch from one provider to another, and address portability might ease switching among ISPs. But e-mail is not phone calls. Is it even possible?
The bill's sponsors apparently assume that e-mail messages work enough like phone calls that whatever they do to make phone numbers portable can work the same way for mail. Unfortunately, they're wrong.
Every time you make a phone call, software in the phone system checks to see if the number you're calling has been ported. Since phone numbers are geographically assigned, there is a shared porting database for each calling area in which the calling switch looks up the dialed number (DN) to get the routing number (RN). If the number hasn't been ported the DN is the same as the RN, but if it has, RN is a number assigned to the switch to which the number has been ported. Then the call is routed based on the RN, but it also sends along the DN so the target switch knows who the call is for. The shared databases are run by a neutral party (Neustar in the US) and every telco pays to support it. The system was designed this way so that numbers that have been ported away don't put an extra load on the "donor" system from which it was ported.
Email doesn't work like that. There is a DNS lookup for the domain name, the part of the address after the @ sign. but all mail within the same domain is routed to the same place. For the small minority of Internet users who have their own domains, they can change the domain's DNS records to change where the mail goes, but for users who get their addresses from their ISP or their employer, it's tied to the ISP or the employer. You can imagine a system in which every mail delivery did a DNS lookup of the e-mail address first, but that's not how the mail system works.
But since this is a government mandate, is there any way to make this sort of work?
There were two other approaches for phone number portability proposed and discarded, call release and call forwarding. In call release, the call first goes to the original switch, which sends back a status message saying the number has been ported to another switch, and the calling switch then reconnects to the other switch. Call forwarding should be familiar to everyone--the called switch places a call to the real destination switch and connects the incoming call to it.
E-mail has analogs to both of these. For something like call release, the SMTP standard has always had a status code that a recipient system can send back to a sending system to say that the recipient has moved, and giving a new address. As far as anyone can tell, nobody has ever used that code, but it's there if anyone wants to give it a try. Mail forwarding, on the other hand, is very common.
The least awful way I can think of to make something like this work for email is that the user's new provider can contact the old provider on the user's behalf, and request the address be forwarded. So long as it's forwarded, the new provider pays the old one a modest monthly fee, mostly to give the providers an incentive to cancel the forward when the user leaves. The fees would probably net out in most cases so the costs would be mostly administrative.
Mechanically, that kind of setup would not be very hard. Administratively, it would be a nightmare. If the forwarded mail starts to bounce are they allowed to turn it off? Does the old provider do its usual spam filtering? (What if the user left because the filtering was lousy and lost a lot of real mail?)
Another possibility would be for the old provider to keep mail accounts active even though the account is otherwise turned off, and let people pick up mail from its mail server. This is surprisingly common now, often by accident. For example, I cancelled my BT broadband account in July when I left England, but the associated mail account still works, seven months later. Mechanically this still isn't hard, but if it's a required service, now each ISP now has a permanent obligation to provide mail service to people from whom they no longer get any income, and with whom they have no other relationship. How do they know when to turn off the mail? If the user doesn't pick up the mail for a month? Six months? A year?
So my main advice is to forget it, since there's little evidence that this is a service so important it needs to be mandated. On the other hand, ISPs might find a small new income stream by selling forwarding service, like many post offices do. If the user is willing to pay $20/yr, that'd probably cover the cost of keeping a mailbox open, and would solve the problem without having to invent new rules and mechanisms.
Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker
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More under: Email
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