Warren Adelman discloses new TLD applications and discusses the challenges of offering more domain choices to customers.
Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, has applied for three top level domains, CEO Warren Adelman told Domain Name Wire today. (News of the applications was first reported by Paul Sloan at CNET).
The company has applied for its own .brand domain .godaddy, as well as two additional top level domains (TLD). That’s a lot less than you can expect from at least one competitor.
“As the world’s largest domain name registrar, we wanted to have our own TLD,” said Adelman.
He thinks the company’s plans for the additional two TLDs will be more interesting. But he is mum on what those TLDs will be since the application process is still open.
Even bigger on the company’s radar for the next couple years is how it will offer hundreds of new TLDs to its customer base.
“No one can sell 2,000 TLDs,” he said.
Go Daddy already uses algorithms to determine which TLDs to show in domain search results. The company received a patent on its ranking system last year. Think of it like Google Adwords; registries “bid” for placement on GoDaddy.com and then are ranked based on a number of algorithms.
“We’ve done some work with it [the algorithm] and you may see it become more important in 2013 as a way for us to actually handle a fairly large number of new TLDs,” said Adelman. “All registrars will have to make decisions about how to best present TLDs to customers.”
With registry-registrar integration, Go Daddy will be able to offer its own TLDs to its customers. Although that may create a conflict, Adelman points to the company’s handling of .me as proof that it can be managed. The company helped commercialize .me, the country code for Montenegro.
“.Me started with an email I sent to the Minister of Communications in Montenegro,” Adelman said. Go Daddy has certainly promoted .me on its site, but it’s not the number one search result.
As for the company’s position on new TLDs in general, Adelman says it has always been cautious.
“We always voiced caution in the size of the rollout,” he said. “We said ‘Listen, there’s a lot of things happening simultaneously — new TLDs, IPV6, IDNs, DNNSEC. Perhaps there should be a more cautious approach.’”
Problems with ICANN’s new TLD application system are one example of unexpected challenges that can come up — and that’s just with applying. Adelman says ICANN will certainly have to explain the problems to the community at its next meeting in Prague. But he puts it in perspective.
“Every day I wake up and, generally speaking, the internet works. People kind of trivialize that accomplishment, but for the most part they’ve made sure the infrastructure is up and working and we can access IP addresses as part of the domain name system. They’ve done this in a complicated environment of various internet users.”
“2013 will be a wild year,” said Adelman.
That’s for sure.
