Written on March 28, 2008 – 3:43 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Yesterday, VeriSign announced that the prices for registering .com and .net domain names will increase. The Internet services company agreed with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that from October 1, the barrier for starting a dotcom site will be higher. This is odd news in an economy where things tend to get cheaper (or even Free) instead of more expensive.
Don’t panic though. The increase is minimal:
VeriSign said the registry fees for .com and .net domain names will increase to $6.86 and $4.23 from $6.42 and $3.85, respectively.
Individuals won’t have to worry about price increases but it might be another blow for domain tasting and kiting. Even a slight increase in costs might make their business-cases less attractive.
Source: Reuters.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on January 30, 2008 – 3:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Not that we needed it, but according to blogger Andrew Messer the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) expressed its appreciation for all those bloggers out there by releasing the new top level domain .BLOG.
The massive increase in Internet traffic due to blogging made it unavoidable to label the 2.0 style journalists and writers. The new domain will become available on April 1st, 2008. I think we can say that April will be a great month for cybersquatters.
The question is though, who will use the new domain? Some predictions that immediately popped up when I was reading the announcement:
- Naturally, tech blogs will battle for the technology.blog, political blogs for politics.blog, humor blogs for humor.blog and so on.
- Some of the big guys will probably register theirname.blog, if they’re fast enough. Nobody wants brand squatting problems like ReadWriteWeb had recently. Yet not all of them will make that effort. Their ranking position in Google, Technorati and Alexa is all based on their old domain. .BLOG is just a fancy thing to own.
- New blogs will use the new domain, yet their influence is marginal. Only few fresh blogs know to attract a large audience (We hope we’re one of them).
- Companies will move their corporate blogs to the new domains, or finally decide to start one. We’ll see domains like Startbucks.blog, Sony.blog and Ford.blog.
But this is just my opinion, looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this new domain. What will you register?
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