Domain grabs
10 Sep 2004For those who’ve had their head in the sand for the past week or so, Afilias, the .info gTLD registry maintainer, have recently announced the availability of one extra years registration for no additional cost. The registrar Spot Domain had a promotion going from the 2nd to the 9th of this month. Yes, that means it’s nearly over in most timezones.
Good, bad or ugly? I’m a little indifferent, seeing both sides of the situation. Steve is decidedly anti-, whilst Dale appears to be completely pro- all free stuff in general. His attitude appears to be shared by much of the Internet at this point in time.
So, time for full disclosure. What’d I grab, and why?
Joahua.info¸
JoshuaStreet.info, and
StreetComputing.info
The most obvious reason, and one which is probably shared with many people who have registered a .info TLD in the last several days, is that it was free. Steve argues this point, saying that there will be a non-financial cost incurred, but in terms of the “here and now” reality for thousands of people online, it’s effectively free. Sad, but true — the Internet often turns into a grab-and-run enterprise.
Do you want another example? Hmm, okay. All the poor suckers who signed up for SMS.ac, thinking it was actually offering SMS at a financial cost borne by no-one. There was a reason I declined all those emails offering me free SMS to friends, and that reason was shared with most who emailed me — hey, guess what, I was right.
But that’s not entirely the case here, is it. Maintaining a namespace registry does cost money. Admittedly, not a whole lot of money, when the scale of such things are taken into account, but still. Someone is paying for this, financially. That someone is being subsidised by the considerably heightened activity of paid registrations (of which there are many!) in the .info namespace. Having said that, we’ll ignore financial problems as a potential “cost” associated with this activity.
The most immediately obvious technical/social problem associated with this is namespace dilution. Seven days is a long time, certainly long enough for people to code bulk-registration scripts and click “Go”. Even if we lived in a world where such things didn’t happen, people are grabbing completely unrelated and pointless namespace, just because. Chances are, in 12 months time, there’ll be an enormous namespace vacancy as thousands of registrations expire, and people don’t care enough to spend money. Having said that, in 12 months time many will also be dependent upon some of the domains they registered, and elect to pay to stay on.
In the interim period, we’ve got a tremendous number of cybersquatters on our hands. Which is perhaps the primary reason I grabbed any domains at all. I do not need any more domains. Joahua.com is fine for all my needs, and anything more is superfluous. Having said that, if I were to leave domains which are relevant only to myself and my online identity to be registered by bots or the masses interested in diluting the value of existing Intellectual Property (I’m thinking of moral rights here, not paid trademarks or patents) online, then my paid namespace, Joahua.com, would suffer because of this.
In terms of falling PageRank, brand recognition and potential confusion of domains (i.e. the content of other domains is something I have no control over — I’d be annoyed were Joahua.info a porn site, or something like that), none of which are desireable outcomes.
I disagree with registering other peoples Intellectual Property by taking advantage of domain registration, free or otherwise. If you’re genuinely interested in namespace which is already taken, politely approach the IP holder, requesting some kind of mutual agreement. To apply that directly to myself, if anyone is interested in the namespace Joahua.info, JoshuaStreet.info or StreetComputing.info, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m more than happy to setup subdomains for you, or provide email forwarding, or acknowledge your existence on this website in an appropriate manner.
Having said all that, I think the initial ripples this has created will probably calm after about 12 to 18 months, seeing the Afilias promotion continues until NYE this year — December 31st, 2004. I’m interested to see what the longer term effects of this situation are.