Search Engine Optimization

Recently  Overstock.com, paid $350,000 for “O.co”name. The president of Overstock, justified the price by the possible opportunities that a one letter domain could represent.

Currently, O.co redirects users to Overstock.com.

Many companies have complained that it has been difficult to find a good .com address, and some are using the launch of the .co domains as a band aid for their fruitless searching for an alternative.

In addition, most registries have strict bans on less than 4 letter domains for many legal and technical reasons; the fact that .co seems to be unconcerned with these problems, makes it seem to be “new thinking”.

One fact that many overlook is that the slick new marketed URL, .co, is just the Internet country code for Colombia. It has been around for years, prior to the current marketing trick, and no one really seemed to notice before.

Consider that new or old, the extensions can be confusing.

When the CCTLD naming conventions were being held, Scotland overlooked the importance and as a result .sc is for “Seychelles” and Scotland has no unique cctld.

No one ever said that the internet was fair. If they did, they probably should be shot.

Prior marketing tactics, like .tv for Tuvalu, .cc for Cocos Keeling, .mp for Marianas and .ws for Samoa have enjoyed marginal success, but not ever making the dent in the .com market-share, that they had all hoped.

According to .CO Internet SAS,  39,000 applicants have sought .co addresses since they became available for registration in February. They contend that there are  70 percent of the brands listed in the BrandFinance top 500, including companies like Nike, eBay, Coca-Cola, Apple and Amazon, but nothing close to the $350,000, paid by Overstock.

Far from philanthropic, rather, .CO Internet SAS seeks maximized profits, and charges premium prices for preferred and generic domain names; this “preferred stock” line of names will be auctioned off at a later date.

Conversely, the .uk domain name turned 25 recently and its birthday was celebrated by its more than 8.5 million domain names and holders.

The registrar responsible for .uk, Nominet, is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, unlike the profit machine that .co is hoping to be.

This means that under British law, it can have members, but not shareholders, pays no dividends and its charges cover running costs.

Anyone with an interest in the Internet may join more than 2,800 Nominet members from all areas of the Internet industry.

Nominet also resolves disputes such as cybersquatting, it runs the DNS infrastructure that keeps .uk working, and It also runs the Tier 1 registry for UK Enum.

This is a unique service that combines telephone numbers and the Domain Name System to simplify the way telephone calls over the Internet work. Enum lets callers know if you can receive VoIP calls.

Nominet research has shown that 77% of British consumers preferred to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching for information online.

Earlier this year, the controversial Digital Economy Act, passed, which gave the secretary of state ultimate control of Nominet, despite its years of successful autonomous operation and a fierce lobbying campaign to stay independent.

Its desire for independence online is not unique however; recently German glass and component company Schott AG has filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for “.schott” for “Registration of domain names (legal services); management of domain names; renting or leasing of domain names; allocation of domain names; trading in domain names.”

The issue arises with US Trademark law as the German glass company “Schott Glass” ( no pun intended initially) owns the trademark for “Schott” and domain names have strict guidelines against being “non-generic” for obvious reasons.

It is widely believed that this application will be denied on these grounds.

The one thing that is a constant, within the realm of the Internet, is that it will never be boring.

Well its finally here.

The internet has finally made its own red light district.
ICANN approved the creation of a .xxx suffix. The design for websites under this extension will be those with pornographic content, as ICANN officials have stated.

The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2005. As expected,  it was rejected immediately, then un-rejected multiple times since inception. However the ICANN announcement means that it will actually become a reality. Unless there are more issues, .xxx will be live in about 9 months. How is that for irony?

ICM Registry Inc. finally got their wish for ICANN to sign off on the .xxx domain. ICM is the company that has been up to bat all these times since 2005, and got rejected over and over until now.

Members of ICANN’s board have argued that in order to maintain neutrality, it should create .xxx and allow websites with sexually explicit content to start using the suffix on a voluntary basis.

The basic idea as I alluded to earlier, is to create a virtual “red light district,” which could be monitored and set to official guidelines. The benefit would be to go to a .xxx site and know that it is safe from viruses or spyware. In addition, it would keep the porn sites in a known area.

Even with this idea of keeping all the “rotten eggs in one basket” there are still opponents of the move, like religious groups and the Free Speech Coalition.
These groups dislike the idea that such an official designation would be given to online porn, despite nearly being on opposite sides of the spectrum.

I have always been of the opinion that having adult sites in one location will make it easier to filter or block access to adult content on their computers. It seems as though this would be a great help for parents.

A few in the adult entertainment industry oppose .xxx, saying it will invite censorship, but then members of religious groups also oppose its creation on obvious moral grounds.

Given that there are an estimated 5 to 6 million adult sites on the World Wide Web, oddly it’s expected that most will have absolutely no interest in moving to the .xxx domain.

Some existing porn sites will surely register xxx versions of their domains, but it seems that this will be in a defensive manner rather than as a new site or a moved site. ICANN expects around half a million .xxx sites will be registered when it finally goes live.

Keep in mind that online pornography is a major industry.  Statistics allude to the fact that $3,000 is spent on Internet porn per second. The math is that there is an estimated 370 million pornographic websites on the Internet. What this adds up to is that .xxx could possibly outpace .com in a perfect storm.  Especially when you factor in that “sex” is the number one search term, globally. “Sex” accounts for 25 percent of all Internet searches.

ICM said it already has 110,000 pre-reservations for .xxx domains, which would possibly cost $60 a year to register.

Less known, but approved today also, is the ICANN decision for domain names written entirely in Chinese characters. This includes the final characters to the right of the last dot where previously, you could have all Chinese characters except for the “.cn”. Now you can even have the “.cn” in Chinese characters.

Now if only someone would tell the .cn registry to allow registrations again.