ICANN gives blessing for one and two-letter .infos

1.info, 2.info, 3.info, 4.info… ICANN has given official approval to Afilias to sell one and two letter .info names, just like Neustar did with .biz several months ago.

The one-letter .biz domains attracted a decent level of attention at auction. Considering that .info is much more popular extension, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of names sell for six figures.

Off the top of my head, some great single-letter .infos would be 1.info for “#1 info,” q.info for “question information,” and a.info for “answer information.” Or what about ny.info for New York information or uk.info for the UK? I think these one and two letter domains have quite a bit of potential.

Afilias seeks approval for one and two character .info names

Afilias, the operator of the .info gTLD, is seeking permission from ICANN to allow the registration of one and two character .info domains. The names are currently reserved for administrative purposes.

The .biz registry auctioned off its one and two character names several months ago with ICANN’s blessing, so Afilias’s request is likely to be approved.

How much will the domains fetch? Probably quite a bit. It is still unclear if Afilias will auction the short names or let anyone register them, but my guess is it will want to auction them. Why would the company accept the standard registration fee for such valuable names, after all?

Afilias releases annual .info report

Afilias, the registry for the .info domain, has released its 2009 report on the TLD. The full document may be viewed at this location, but here’s a quick run-down:

• Out of all the TLDs, .info is the seventh-most popular.
• It makes up 40% of all new TLD registrations.
• There are currently more than 5.3 million registrations.
• The domain is most popular in North America and Europe, where 61% and 23% of its registrations originate respectively.
• Asia is a growing market for .info. Currently, the region owns 11% of its names.

Part of .info’s success is no doubt due to its very low registration fee, which is often as low as $1 USD. As fas as I’m concerned, however, .com is still king.

Photo | Flickr

German site thueringen.info wins .INFO Award

Afilias has announced the winners of its new .INFO Awards. Coming in first place is thueringen.info, a travel portal for the Thuringia region of Germany. The owner of the site won a cash prize of $7,500.

In second place is GPS-Tour.info and in third is Turkel.info. Each site won $5,000 and $3,000 respectively.

The contest winners were determined by a user vote. Afilias started the contest as a way to demonstrate the usefulness of the .info extension. From a marketing perspective, the award is good way to get the word out about the extension, but I still think .info has a long way to go in proving its reliability and viability to the general public.

Vote now in the .INFO Awards

In an effort to promote the .info extension, registry Afilias is holding a contest for the best .info site. Ten finalists have been selected and the top three will split a $15,500 cash prize.

Votes may be placed here. Polling will be available until November 6. The finalists are:

http://www.turkel.info

http://www.gps-tour.info

http://www.solicitor.info

http://de.med.info

http://www.digitaldruck.info/

http://your-affiliate.info/

http://www.thueringen.info

http://www.zulassungsdienst.info

http://www.westsussex.info

http://www.santosbrazil.info

Nearly 50% of submissions came from the United Sates and Germany, but the rest came from a smorgasbord of countries. Most entries were either special interest, corporate, or private sites.

Afilias is using the contest to demonstrate that .info is a quality extension, but as far as I’m concerned, .com is still king.

Source | DN Journal

Disney wins domain dispute, but was it worth the effort?

Disney recently filed a complaint over the domain dealsdisney.info with the National Arbitration Forum. Arguing that the domain infringed on its trademark, the company won the case. But was it really worth the time and effort?

Disney spent thousands of pounds in arbitration fees and employee time for a domain that costs as little as 3 pounds per year to own. While there are certainly cases where it would make sense to gain control of a trademark-infringing domain– say if it were causing large financial losses or ruining the firm’s reputation– what good is dealsdisney.info going to do for Disney?

My guess is the domain was automatically registered by a bot and parked. Few, if anyone, probably ever visited it. The name was causing no financial loss to Disney. The company acquired it simply because it could.

Often times many instances of trademark infringement are not pursued because the cost of doing so is far greater than the benefits. In this case, it looks like Disney made a foolish decision. Companies do have to enforce their trademarks in order to maintain them, but my guess is no one would dispute Disney’s trademark if it turned a blind eye to a .info domain or two.

BodyBuilding.info sells for £8,228

The .info domain extension usually doesn’t fair well at auction, but today is an exception with the sale of BodyBuilding.info for £8,228 ($14,500 USD). Compare that to BodyBuilding.net, which only fetched £2,785 ($4,750 USD) in 2005. Clearly this is a sign that domains have become much more valuable over the last four years.

A pair of French insurance domains, Assurancevie.com and Assurance-vie.com, also sold together for £53,024 ($87,000 USD). “Assurancevie” means “life insurance,” which makes sense considering they sold for an amount that could be a life savings for some.

Engagement-rings.co.uk sold for £7,000 ($11,486 USD). No doubt this was in part influenced by the recent sale of DiamondRings.com for £141,589.

Source: Domain Name Wire

Global Phishing Survey Is Too "Phishy" to Swallow

The APWG, a committee dedicated to combating Internet scams and fraud, released what they call the Global Phishing Survey today. The report, which analyzed more than 30,000 phishing websites in 2008, can be downloaded here (PDF).

The organization measured the prevalence of a given domain using the metric “phishing attacks per 10,000.” It looked at TLDs with a minimum of 30,000 registrations. Venezuela’s .ve came in first, with a score of 182.3 attacks per 10,000 domains. Trailing far behind in second is Thailand with a score of 22.1 for its .th domain.

France came in eleventh with a score of 3.3. The .uk extension didn’t make the list. Surprisingly, .info had a low score. It bested .com’s 1.8 and .org’s 2.1 with a rock-bottom 1.0. The median score was 2.7 and the average was 6.3, a number which the APWG admits is skewed by TLDs with a high number of registrations.
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