Recent Posts
- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
- .ai up to 425,000 domains
- A million “free” .music domains up for grabs
- D3 to get $5 million in crypto to apply for .ape gTLD
- Alibaba hit with ICANN breach notice
- New Vegas conference “Davos for Web3 interoperability”
- ICANN content policing power grab may be dead
- Cable company unplugs its dot-brand after acquisition
- Germany crosses 10,000 dot-brand domains milestone
- Founders out as Com Laude gets equity injection
- PIR’s Diaz to leave domain industry
- Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment
- ICANN opens $217 million Grant Program
- Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)
- .ai registry fights deadbeats with tweaked auction rules
- Amazon and Google among .internal TLD ban backers
- .ai registry advises buyers not to use GoDaddy
- .post liberalizes with new sunrise period
- Team Internet spends $41 million on content farm
- Epik backtracks on Kiwi Farms claim after legal threat
- .austin names launch on blockchain
- Freenom shuts down 12.6 million domains — report
- GoDaddy’s next .xxx contract may not be a done deal
- GlobalBlock blocking 2.5 million domains
- Microsoft moving its cloud apps from .com to .microsoft
- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
- ICANN scores win in single-letter .com lawsuit
- Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD
- Up to 70 jobs on the line at Nominet as .uk regs dwindle
- Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay
- Private auctions could be banned in new gTLD next round
- ICANN meeting venue “insensitive and hurtful”
- GoDaddy to start selling graphic.design domains
- GAC spinning up new gTLD curveball at ICANN 79?
- GoDaddy’s GlobalBlock supports blockchain names
- Police .uk domain takedowns dive in 2023
- GoDaddy wants to cut the bullshit from .xxx
- Dueling domain blocking services to launch at ICANN 79
- Freename tries to bridge DNS and blockchain
- Olive retires from ICANN
- Whois policy published without life-saving disclosure rule
- UK gov takes its lead from ICANN on DNS abuse
- Tucows reports 2023 results
- Twitter “completely unresponsive” on clickable domains
- ICANN spends $5 million more than planned in first fiscal half
- .art takes a million domains off its premium list
- KeyTrap ‘the most devastating vulnerability ever found in DNSSEC’
- Freenom settles $500 million Meta lawsuit and will exit domain business
- New gTLD lottery to return in 2026
- First GlobalBlock prices revealed — they ain’t cheap
- Domain universe grows on new gTLDs despite .com shrinkage
- D3 signs up crypto gTLD client number five
- GoDaddy reports strong domains growth
- How to qualify for a $40,000 gTLD
- Registry service provider evaluation handbook published
- WebUnited inks deal to “mirror” country’s TLD in the blockchain
- GoDaddy project unveils brand-blocking calculator
- Report: Monster “misappropriated” millions from Epik
- .com is shrinking but Verisign raises prices again anyway
- D3 announces fourth crypto new gTLD client
- Donald Trump loses second UDRP case
- UK cybersquatting complaints hit record low
- No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse
- ICANN insists it is working on linkification
- Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps
- GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration
- Epik reveals who is running the company
- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
- Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services
- Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime
- Team Internet says revenue beat estimates
- Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction
- .ai helps UDRP cases rise in 2023, WIPO says
- Freenom’s domains land at Gandi after termination
- .ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite
- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
- Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
- ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable
- You can’t use money to buy .box domains
- After 14 years, ICANN practices what it preaches on IDNs
- Weak demand for private Whois data, ICANN data shows
- .ing doing way better than .meme
- DNS Women barred from ICANN funding?
- Dev releases free open-source TLD registry platform
- INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital
- Anguilla fears the .ai junk drop
- Five more gTLDs get launch dates
- $10 million of ICANN cash up for grabs
- Almost 50,000 .ai domains sold in a quarter
- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
- Life insurance company kills dot-brand
- ICANN finds new home for Lebanon’s TLD after founder’s death
- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
- Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant
- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
- Amazon planning new push into registrar market?
- Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules
- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
- Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars
- GoDaddy service to let you block domains in over 650 TLDs
- Did I find a murder weapon in a zone file?
- ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman
- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
- Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system
- Nominet to take over .gov.uk
- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
- ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live
- .au regs slide on 2LD anniversary
- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
- Two more dot-brands bite the dust
- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
- Did somebody spend a million bucks on a Google domain hack?
M+M joins .music fight
Minds + Machines parent Top Level Domain Holdings has become the third company to publicly confirm an application for the .music top-level domain.
TLDH has partnered with “music industry figures including artists, managers, music producers and lawyers” going by the name of LHL TLD Investment Partners on a joint-venture bid.
M+M will provide the technical back-end for the applicant.
The other two known applicants for .music are Far Further, which has the backing of most major music trade groups, and the long-running MyTLD/Music.us/Roussos Group campaign.
Assuming Roussos and TLDH can each pull one plausible public comment objection out of the bag, Far Further’s Community Priority Evaluation is probably scuppered.
With two objections, a CPE candidate needs a perfect 14/14 score on the remaining criteria, which is likely going to be pretty difficult when you’re applying for such a generic term.
In other new gTLD applicant news…
.miami — TLDH also announced today that it plans to apply for .miami, having secured the support of City of Miami in a 4-0 vote of its commissioners.
.nyc – The city of New York has reportedly granted its consent to Neustar to apply for .nyc, apparently beating out other wannabe applicants including TLDH.
.vlaanderen – The Flemish government has awarded the right to apply for .vlaanderen (.flanders) to DNS.be. The registry will reportedly work with Nic.at on the application.
.nagoya – GMO Registry has announced a bid for the Japanese city gTLD .nagoya, with the backing of the local government. Nagoya is Japan’s third-largest city.
Do these suckers…er…sponsors…actually think that there is a demand for such alternative tlds?
There is not and I suspect they will soon learn this the hard way.
Ask O.CO how that worked out for them. If there is such a demand for new domains, why did New.Net fail?
Cells are big. Why did .mobi fail? People want to be pros, yet .PRO failed. People all have names, yet do you know anyone with a .NAME?
Nah, me either.
The entire concept is doomed to fail and to seperate suckers from their money. The only beneficiaries will be the registries, ICANN, consultants and trademark attorneys. No one else.
Don’t waste your money.
I, too, want to sponsor a new tld and hereby affirm my committment to the process…
YES, I am interested in trying to get an unreasonable number of suckers to sign up for my silly gtld and in annually charging them far more than the price of a .com.
YES, I am interested in creating a new, longtail tld which will leak traffic like crazy and only help its .COM counterpart.
YES, I am interested in trying to trick investors into believing that hundreds of thousands of idiots (no, wait…millions!!!) will actually want to set up cyber businesses under our .CRAPOLLA tld when history has clearly shown that there is no interest in alternative extensions.
YES, I am interested in offsetting promotional and advertising efforts of each of the Fortune 500 — all of which exclusively use .COM. I acknowledge that I will also need to offset over 20 years of .COM brainwashing and am willing to certify that I have the trillions of dollars that will be needed to successfully do this.
YES, I am interested in obligating myself to an ICANN contract that makes no sense and am willing to blindly support this business which will most likely be hemmoraging money forevermore with no possible exit strategy. I am prepared to go down with the ship and sell blood, sperm and my wife’s jewelry if necessary since bankrupcy can not be an option.
YES, YES, YES…sign me up! I am very interested!
no matter what I’ll keep using iTunes.
Why am I not surprised? M+M has a tendency to steal other people’s work (especially if other parties have done a lot of work) and try to pretend it is theirs and try to piggy bag others. Antony van Couvering and Fred Krueger and the rest of their gang, including ex-Chairman Dengate Thrush should be ashamed of their business ethics and their whole approach not only on .MUSIC but for .BERLIN and others. That said, I have officially joined the bandwagon of M+M critics and preparing our war chest against the opposition.
The ICANN Board should seriously also look at M+M business practices. This will certainly be a long a drawn out process, including legal. Furthermore, perhaps ICANN can make a good faith donation to M+M to take a course in business ethics 🙂
Soon the .com bubble will burst. All of those who are holding hundreds and thousands of .com domains to make money will soon see their domains are not that worth anymore.
I hope someone will apply for a .software, .system, .solutions etc, gTLDs. I will be the first to register one for my company. People who are giving examples for the failures of .pro, .mobi, .co etc are not understanding one main point. The new gTLDs are not short names but these are exact words and that will definitely make a difference.
Ismail M.
I’m looking through the Guidebook carefully, but I do not see where it says if you buy a bunch of Facebook and MySpace fans and can play three chords on a guitar that no-one else can apply for .MUSIC.
Guys, guys… please!
Don’t duke this out on a blog forum.
File your applications, go through evaluation, hire your lawyers and do what you have to do.
But, seriously, please understand that your sniping at each other on blogs doesnt do either one of you any good. You are only going to say something which you are going to regret later, it doesn’t do anything to advance your applications, and most importantly it doesn’t inspire a whole lot of trust or respect for either of you in the broader community.
Play nice.
John —
Well said. Let’s all play by the rules and abide by them.
Fred
I used to have to listen to this stuff when my boys were a lot younger, on long car trips.
“Tell him to stop hitting me!”
“I’m not hitting him. He took my Pokeman card!”
“I did not, he gave it to me!”
I am not kidding. One time on a ski trip in Maine, I pulled over in freezing weather, told then to take off their shirts and get outside until they decided to quit fighting. Ask MJ, she’ll tell you I’m not joking. I’m a “dog on the roof” kinda guy on those trips.
If we have to listen to this stuff out of you two (or the rest of you knuckleheads) for the next umpteen months I will personally hire a sound crew to find where you live, set up huge speakers, and play North Korean radio propaganda turned up to 11 every night and all G-damned night long until your ears bleed.
Do I make myself clear?
Suitably chastened…
Antony/Fred,
I have a lot to say to both of you and it has nothing to do with the rules in the ICANN guidebook but other more important rules that revolve around business ethics. However, I will remain respectful to the community that reads these boards and of course John Berryhill 🙂
P.S Don’t underestimate how many chords I can play
@ISMAIL:
I choked when I read your last sentence…
“The new gTLDs are not short names but these are exact words and that will definitely make a difference.”
Er… what about .Travel?
Or .Museum? Or .Aero?
Or .Coop? Or .Name?
Yeah, you keep those blinders on and keep on thinking that it was the abbreviation that was the problem.
@ Tim Davids,
I think I’ll stick with Rhapsody. 🙂
The ICANN Board only approved gTLDs because of their collective and individual greed and conflicts of interest.
I have never observed such a high level of cronyism and incestous business dealings in any other organisation.