Recently in TLD and ccTLDs Registries Category

With the Local Sunrise phase of the .Co ccTLD launch closed and roughly two weeks until the end of the Global Sunrise, Landrush (public availability at a price of around USD $300 per year) is not far away.

The Landrush phase is provided for businesses that do not hold a registered trademark for a particular name, but wish to protect their brand. This phase gives them the opportunity to register the .co variation of their existing domain, though owning the existing domain is not a requirement. Since this phase is technically open to anyone, many of the bigger domainers will be buying up valuable generic domains. The high price is designed to discourage domainers from snapping up too many domains, during this phase. If two or more people attempt to register the same domain during this phase, it will go into an auction.

According to The VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief, February 2010, the number of .com domains registered has grown to over 80 million over the last 25 years.  At the same time, the average daily DNS query volume is now more than 52 billion queries per day.

The ICM registry has won an appeal for an independent review of the .xxx extension.

The proposed TLD .xxx is suggested as an option for sexually explicit Internet websites. .xxx would be suitable for adult material, similar to .edu for education and .gov for government bodies.

The .xxx would be suitable for adult material, similar to .edu for education and .gov for government bodies. The appeal has caused controversy for both those for and against the introduction of the TLD.

The idea of .xxx would be to implement a way for those who wish to provide access to pornographic nature on the web and also make it easier for those who don't wish to view explicit material to block the websites. This would also make it easier for search engines to block .xxx websites.

CNINIC (.CN Registry) has recently introduced stricter regulations for registering .CN domains. As a results, some Chinese businesses and website owners are looking elsewhere when registering domain names. The new regulations require that .CN domains be registered with the Chinese government. Failure to do some will result in your domain being disabled/deleted.

According to CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), individuals will soon be able to register domain names under the .cn extension.

At the moment .cn names are restricted to companies. CNNIC explains their move by saying that individuals either fake themselves as companies or register abroad.

Obviously a .FR name targets only the French market so you may dismiss it as not worth a lot of money. However credit.fr just sold for 587,500 euros, that is a bit less than 900,000 US dollars.

Noone can say this is not a lot of money !

This shows why you need to consider foreign markets and ccTLD when investing in domain names. There are some huge opportunities to be had, provided you do a bit of research first.

As of February 1st 2010 registration of domain names with special characters in them, like for example a letter with an accent, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)  .lu will be possible. Acceptable special characters are those commonly used in Luxembourg, German and French languages.

There will be a two months sunrise period between February 1st 2010 and March 31st 2010. During this sunrise period owners of registered .lu names will be able to register the identical names with special characters. After this sunrise period beginning April 1st 2010 IDN registrations will be open for everybody and performed on a "first-come, first-served basis".

VeriSign has recently announced that they will be raising .COM and .NET annual fees as of July 1st, 2010. ICANN has an agreement that VeriSign is allowed to raise their .COM fees by up to 7% per year. VeriSign took advantage of this in the first two years of its contract, raising .COM registration from $6.00 to $6.86. It was assumed that VeriSign would increase its prices every year to maximize profits, but it did not in 2009.

Paris, the capital city of France, applied for .paris to become a top level domain (TLD) in June, 2008.

The TLD for France is .fr.

The Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, began a campaign on behalf of Paris, on December 9th 2009, to support the .paris TLD request.

Google ventured into new territory this week with the launch of a new URL-shortening service it's calling Goo.gl.

Unlike some existing and high-profile shorteners such as TinyURL and Bit.ly, Goo.gl is not a general-purpose link shrinker that users can access by going to a standalone site. Instead, it's been built into Google products, beginning with Google's browser toolbar and its Feedburner RSS service. Both of those services can now create shortened Goo.gl URLs that link to the source content while using fewer characters. This is especially important for sharing on places like Twitter, where there are size limits.