An article in the US business magazine Bloomberg BusinessWeek suggests two of the world’s biggest brands don’t think new gTLD plans will affect them using their tradtional .com. The article includes confirmation from representatives of Procter and Gamble and Hewlett Packard saying that they don’t plan to apply for new top level domain names.

That’s interesting especially since HP are are one of the companies known to have complained to ICANN that the new domain extensions won’t include two letter extensions which will remain reserved for country codes – obviously .hp would be a lot more appealing to them if it were available.

The article says none of the 21 companies out of the top 500 ranked by Standard and Poor have yet set down plans to apply for one of the new domains – applications for which open in January next year. The US$185,000 for each domain suffix appeared to be a barrier at the start for all but the top brands, but with top brands possibly even shying away it could make the existing .com extension even more valuable.

Are you considering applying for your own gTLD? Would you take preference over a brand that used its own domain over a generic one?

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We’ve not run with a story for a while of somebody nearly losing their business by failing to re-new their domain name, so we thought this story last week from the other side of the world was worth repeating.

Last week investmentproperty.com.au was sold at auction for an Australian domain name record of Aus$125,000, a fantastic windfall for the domain name owner who sold, but a sickener for the person who used to own it. That’s because it appears the former owner appears to have let renewal lapse on the domain, leaving it available to the open market and a new owner. Indeed according to this report it appears the former owner wasn’t even aware he no longer owned it, let alone the fact that he had just seen a potential fortune slip from his grasp.

The moral, make sure your domain names are set to auto-renew and make sure suitable payment methods are also registered on your account. With 123-reg you can register several different payment methods as well as use auto-renewal to make sure you won’t miss a vital renewal. Even if you don’t intend to use the domain immediately, it is well worth renewing a domain. If you felt it had a value when you registered it, the chances are others will feel the same now and in the future and with the supply of snappy, easy to read domain names ever limited, that domain may one day form  your pension. In relation to the investmentproperty.com.au domain name, even the domain name speculators and experts on web forum DNTrade.com.au only thought that domain would sell for $10,000, so the final price of $125,000 shows just how value of a domain can reach far above expectations.

Do you auto-renew domains? Have you ever let a domain expire and later regretted it?

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A new report from the godaigroup has revealed how companies could be unwittingly compromising their own corporate security by using sub-domains and not registering relevant alternatives of their full domain, allowing cyber thieves to nab the domains and pick up sensitive information via innocent typing errors made by third-parties.

The report suggests that around 30% of the top 500 companies in the US could be vulnerable to this security loophole because of the way organisations set up their email systems. It has become commonplace for global organisations to operate on a single domain for with sub-domains then used to differentiate individual business units, regional offices or foreign subsidiaries. This is usually done via a subdomain and full stop ahead of the main domain. An example being, a retailer operating shop.com as their main domain but using us.shop.com as the route for their staff email.

Cyber criminals are capitalising on the fact that far too often typos see that dot omitted so in the example above would register the alternative domain usshop.com. By so doing for a number of high profile brands, the researchers claim to have grabbed 20GB of data made up of 120,000 wrongly sent messages over a six month period. All without any knowledge of the companies these emails were intended for. The report says that some of those intercepted names contained user names, passwords, and details of corporate networks.

By setting up these similar doppelganger domains, the researchers were able to receive messages that would otherwise bounce back if the domains didn’t exist.

Worryingly, only one of the companies being impersonated noticed that spoofing was taking place and tracked down the researchers, so the exact size of the problem can’t really be ascertained. Researchers even suggest a clever attacker could cover –up what they are doing by passing on the message to its correct recipient and relaying back any reply.

The moral to the story would appear to be make sure you register all alternatives of your domain. For a small additional cost you will not only be ensuring your company security but also receiving all potential customer enquiries also suffering from typo errors.

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We seem to report these slip-ups on a regular basis but this time Disney are the big corporate left with egg on their face after failing to automatically renew the domain name for their kid-focused social-media / entertainment site Club Penguin.

With an estimated 12 million members and lots of media coverage sure to follow, it’s a bit of a PR gaff by Disney who really should have known better. A technical glitch was how the official blog described it once the issue had been dealt with and the site was back up and running.

Club Penguin Insiders an unofficial blog and fan-site ran the true story on Monday including a WHOIS screen grab showing the domain actually expired on 13 June.

As domain owners though, Disney were able to rectify things within a few hours, obviously paying their renewal fee to their registrar and getting the site back online, but it is a lesson to everybody. Make sure you don’t suffer the same fate. Check all your essential domains and services are set to auto-renew and that we hold up to date payment details for you. You can do this via your 123-reg Control Panel.

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Rarely does the world’s media get excited over a domain name story but yesterday’s announcement that Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the regulating body for international domain names, had voted to introducing new gTLDs (generic top level domains) in 2012, seemed to get plenty of coverage.

That is probably because the new releases could change the way we look at domain names forever. The plan is to introduce new domains like ‘.eco’, ‘.green’, ‘.berlin’, ‘.paris’, ‘.auto’. Whereas a .com has almost lost its commercial-tag, and even .org lots its original not-profit making connotation, the new proposals from ICANN would launch a who new set of domain suffixes that offer an immediate description and identifier for the type of site or organisation using it. Where the new domains could also lead is the possibility of branding the internet, with the application procedure being very much pitched towards big businesses looking to secure their unique domain identifier.

As well as increasing the potential domain options available to the future it also opens up some interesting legal debates too. Ownership of the new domains can be applied for early next year via a 360 page application form and an application fee of around £114,000. Not cheap and therefore only really open to the very rich and biggest brands. Will this only serve to enhance their dominance? Is it right that an internet domain suffix be available simple to the person who could most afford it and with it their control over how it is policed and used? Some fear it is also a move too far away from the original internet ideals where everybody is equal and respected in equal measure.

The intellectual property lawyers will no doubt be kept busy too across the globe, arguing for and against what trademark and property rights owners should have preference for owning a domain suffix that clearly fits with two brands with equal claim but who in the traditional world operate in different spheres so have never really experienced conflict before.

Yet, once applied for and captured the hefty investment made by brand owners in obtaining that branded top level domain could be priceless. Imagine every one of your network, users or fans being able to use the username@yourdomain for their email address. No .com, just your brand. Tempting for sure.

How it all shakes up is yet to be seen. The application procedure will only be open for a handful of weeks at the start of next year and then, according to trusted rumour, the chance to grab your own gTLDs might not become available again for many years. It is almost now or never.

What are your thoughts on ICANN’s decision? Is it a positive thing for the internet?

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You might have noticed that we’ve launched a few new domain name extensions on 123-reg over the last year or so. Most recently, it’s been the turn of .so domains – you’ll be able to register domain names ending in .so from 1 April 2011.

(No, we didn’t have any choice over the date. And no, it’s not a joke.)

How new domains are created

New domain names aren’t just created and released overnight. The exact process depends on what sort of domain name extension it is:

• Country code domains, like .uk (for the United Kingdom), .cn (for China) and .co (for Colombia) are administered by the relevant country’s government. In practice, an appointed organisation usually runs the domain. In the UK, Nominet does this. Every country has its own country code. It’s up to them how they use it.
• Other domain extensions – like .com, .mobi and .info – are created by ICANN, the organisation with overall control of the domain name system. Getting a new extension created is very complicated, though plans are afoot to liberalise the market (mind you, you’ll still need hundreds of thousands of pounds and creating a new extension could take a year or more).

Anyway, let’s just suppose that a new domain name’s about to hit the market. What happens next?

The stages of domain name registration

Once a new domain name extension has received the seal of approval from ICANN, there are a series of stages to the registration process:

• Sunrise. During the sunrise period, it’s usually only trademark holders who can register domain names. Every trademark holder gets checked individually, to make sure their application is legitimate.The idea is that trademark holders can protect their brand early – although there’s usually a hefty premium to register at this stage.

  Sunrise is for people who can prove they have the ‘right’ to a particular domain name.

• Landrush. At landrush stage, anyone can apply to register any domain name. However, they’re not sold on a first-come-first-served basis. Instead, domains are allocated at the end of the landrush period.

  If more than one application is received for a domain name, it’s auctioned off.

  Landrush is for people willing to pay more to secure a domain name.

Both the sunrise and landrush stages are usually run by the domain name registrar – the organisation that manages that domain name extension. Each stage can last a month or two. It’s not until the third stage that domain name companies like 123-reg usually start selling the domains:

• General availability. Following on from sunrise and landrush, general availability is when anyone can take their pick of the remaining domain names.

  When we talk about pre-ordering domain names on 123-reg, it’s in preparation for general availability – if you place a preorder with us, we automatically try and register your domain name(s) the second general availability starts.

  General availability is the ‘free for all’, when domains become available at more reasonable prices.

Although not every new domain name follows this process exactly, most are released in a similar manner.

As for our new .so domain names? You can pre-order up until 31 March. If you don’t get your pre-order in time, come back to our site on or after 1 April, when you’ll be able to register .so domain names there and then.

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(Image courtesy of gwire under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.)

The start of the year is traditionally a time when bloggers make foolhardy predictions, thus putting themselves at risk of ridicule in the next end-of-year roundup.

We’ve never been ones to shun such an opportunity, so here’s what we think 2011 has in store for the world of domain names.

1. XXX domain names to hit the market – and the headlines

June 2010 finally saw the much-discussed .xxx domain extension get the official go-ahead. This domain extension will be used for just the kind of family unfriendly sites you’d imagine.

We ran a customer survey a few months back which showed 70% of people would be happy for us to sell these domains, but we still expect plenty of news coverage for the domain name industry when the first .xxx domains appear in 2011.

2. Security problems for URL shortening services

Last year, a single URL generated through website address shortening service bit.ly resulted in over 352 million spam emails. That’s a lot of junk. And it gets worse – because they hide the original website address, URL shorteners can redirect you to malware-ridden websites.

We think this problem will become more widespread in 2011 – and as a result, more sites will set up private short URLs, reducing the need for public services like bit.ly. (And we haven’t even mentioned some of the other risks.)

3. Another big company domain name embarrassment

In 2008 it was Emirates and GMTV. In 2009 famous toy shop Hamleys fell victim to the same problem. And last year saw Boris Johnson lose control of BackBoris.com, which he’d previously used to promote his successful bid to become Mayor of London. Whoops.

We confidently predict that at least one well-known company or organisation will suffer the same fate in 2011 by failing to pay to renew an important domain name. A word of advice? Use autorenewal, folks.

4. A royal wedding domain name glut

Everyone loves a wedding. Especially domainers, who went crazy registering domain names the moment Wills and Kate announced their engagement. It’s just like when we first heard of Sarah Palin.

The big day is still a few months away, but as April 29 gets closer, we reckon the market will be flooded with second rate royal wedding related domains for sale at knock down prices. Will anyone actually want them?

5. We won’t get a look in on one and two-letter domains

Nominet – which oversees .uk domain names – plans to release a bunch of one- and two-letter domain names which have been unavailable up until now. But don’t get your hopes up about bagging one then selling it on for a profit.

The impossibility of registering one of the tiny number of domains left after the ‘sunrise’ period for trademark owners means you’ll have to be very, very lucky to do well out of this.

6. Olympics domains will take off. Some people will get burnt

As the 2012 Olympics get closer, we’ll see more people trying to make a fast buck by selling on Olympics-related domain names. But be very, very careful. There are tight restrictions around when and how you can use words and symbols relating to the Olympics.

Sure, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) seems to have taken a relaxed view so far, but there’s nothing to stop them clamping down on profiteering as the Games draw closer. On balance, it would probably be unwise to spend £7,000 on 2012-london-olympics.co.uk then.

Oh – and one last prediction: we’ll be seeing lots more new domain name extensions on 123-reg, starting with .so, which is coming very soon. Watch this space.

Leave a comment and let us know what you’re expecting from 2011.

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