ICANN is considering opening single letter domain names, such as e.com, for registration.

ICANN stopped allowing registration of single letter domains in 1993. Only 6 single letter domains had been registered by then, including X.com which is now owned by PayPal through a merger. Some two letter domains also aren’t available for registration because of confusion with certain two letter country code domain extensions. Two character domains will not be affected by this action.

If ICANN decides to offer single letter domains it will need to decide how to issue them. The value of these domains is easily $100k each, and some could top $1M. ICANN may decide to auction the domains. This would be a great way to generate revenue for ICANN. Perhaps they could give this back to the domain name community by reducing current fees including the $.25/domain ICANN fee.

The press gobbled up a news release over the holiday about a Dutch company creating an alternative to ICANN’s domain name system.

Been there, done that. Similar to New.net, this system takes advantage of unsuspecting consumers who pay money for domain names that only work for a fraction of internet users. But the bigger problem lies in trademarks. If someone registered a something.xxx domain from New.net, they could theoretically get a trademark for the domain. Does that mean they have first rights to the “real” something.xxx domain when/if that extension becomes available through ICANN?

A number of alternatives to the usual domain naming system have been attempted (remember Real Names?). The bottom line is that the current domain name system is surprisingly efficient. Alternatives are merely an attempt to milk people for money.

Ben Cohen and his CyberBritain company have given up the challenge for getting the iTunes.co.uk domain back from Apple. Apple won the domain from Cohen back in March. Cohen challenged Apple’s victory in the UK court system.

Apple may have won this one, but it still needs to get its domain name strategy together. It could have avoided the legal expenses of this entire debacle by having a proactive domain name policy. How they neglected to register the iPodNano.com domain name before releasing the product is beyond me.

This isn’t just a problem at Apple. Many companies don’t have a domain name policy, and it’s merely an afterthought. I recently had a conversation with a vice president at a Fortune 500 company that was merging with another company. I asked the person if they had secured the domains for the merged company’s name and products, and the VP said “I think that sort of thing just gets taken care of”. Well, it didn’t get taken care of and someone else has registered key domains for the new company name and its products.

A few years ago we paid $70 to register a domain. Then the likes of Doster and GoDaddy came around, offering domains for under $15. 1&1 offers them for $5.99, which means they actually lose a penny on .com registrations.

Now you can register a domain for $2.95 with no strings attached. This isn’t like the GoDaddy offer that requires you to buy another service. After the first year the price increases to $8.25. That’s not bad, but if you want you can just transfer it to another registrar.

IPOWER is offering this deal. I checked out their domain registration terms and it appears they are using Tucows domain system. I’m not sure how easy it is to manage domains with them, but this offer could result in massive registrations.

UPDATE: I registered 4 domains with IPOWER on Wednesday. They are all managed through Tucows’ OpenSRS. Unfortunately you can’t change your domains DNS servers through OpenSRS if the domains are locked. You must contact IPOWER to unlock the domains, then you can change the nameservers. If you want to lock the domains again you must contact IPOWER again

UPDATE 2: Just got an email from someone who registered 50 domains with IPOWER. OpenSRS generates an entirely new login for each domain. There’s no central management. So here’s the deal. Is it worth saving $5 per domain to have to email support to unlock domains, and have to manage a different account for each domain? If it makes you feel better, IPOWER loses $3.30 in hard costs on each registration.

When I closed on my purchase of blogs.info for $3,000 last week, I figured it might land in the top three spots on DNJournal’s weekly sales report for new TLDs. Last week the #3 spot on the charts was the $3,000 sale of Footwear.info. The week before that a $3,000 sale would have taken the #1 spot.

But not this week–not the best week ever for new TLD sales! My purchase of blogs.info landed all the way down at #8 on DNJournal’s charts! But hey, I’m not complaining. This is great news!

The #1 and #2 positions on the chart were taken by Meningitus.us and Meningitus.biz, each selling for $15,000. Cards.biz sold for $11,750, and Find.biz for €9,000. Drop down four more spots to hit blogs.info. I’m currently developing Blogs.info into a blog directory. It’s live on the web, but not finished yet.

The top sale of the week was Bogota.com for $159,500, which I discussed a few days ago. CasinoRoyale.com also closed on SnapNames for $50,000.

A huge Chinese extension domain sale was Game.com.cn for $35,000 at Sedo. This is the highest ever reported sale of a .com.cn domain to DNJournal.

And check this one out…FamilyWatchdog.us.com, a CentralNic subdomain, sold for $3,000. I wonder if the buyer knew what he was getting?

This is just a small part of a big sales week. Visit DNJournal to read the rest.