777.tel on its way.

Soon you’ll be able to register .tel domain names existing solely of two or more digits.

This week ICANN’s Board of Directors agreed to amend its registry agreement with Telnic to allow for the numeric domain names.

Telnic requested the change through the Registry Service Evaluation Policy (RSEP) process, which opened up the proposal to public comments.

Go Daddy filed comments opposed to Telnic’s plan. The registrar argued that the change was not a new “registry service” and was a “fundamental change” to .tel’s charter.

Go Daddy said that this change was unfair to another applicant that tried to get .tel, and thus the contract should be rebidded:

We believe that this request cannot be granted without requiring the rebidding of the .tel sTLD itself. It is unfair to other applicants and potential applicants to allow an sTLD to change its purpose after the
fact. Telnic’s promise not to allow numeric only second level registrations was a fundamental aspect of its application and, if we understand the decision correctly, a primary reason why .tel was awarded to Telnic and not Pulver (numeric only second level names were fundamental to Pulver’s application for .tel at the same time).

Although I’m not sure how much Go Daddy cared about .tel’s request (Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel domain names), it appeared to be raising a red flag about other registries changing their plans:

We believe that certain other recent requests under the guise of the RSEP by sTLDs were also likely inappropriate for similar reasons and we are concerned about what appears to be a growing trend to misuse the RSEP. We hope our comments will encourage Staff and Board to review these requests more critically in the future.

Also on this week’s board agenda was to approve number-only .name domain names, but I cannot find a resolution on this topic. [Update: the board deferred on number-only .name domains.]

Look for shorter .tel domain names soon.

.Tel registry Telnic has formally asked ICANN to allow it to offer one and two character .tel domain names. The company would not offer two letter domains that correspond to an existing country code, nor would it release one and two digit domain names.

Telnic wants to initially ask interested parties to respond to a request for proposal in order to obtain one of the domains. While other top level domain registries have used a similar process, it’s not clear what Telnic will be looking for given that .tel domain names can’t be “developed”, which was a key criteria in other releases. Perhaps they’ll want someone who plans to make a creative use of .tel. They’ll also look for big brands that will help get the word out about .tel. For example, they might wish to award HP the domain name HP.tel, while they’d prefer not to give me aa.tel (my initials) because they won’t get much marketing return for it.

After the RFP process, domains will be available at a premium price. Any domains not allocated during the premium phase will be available at regular prices.

eNom offers promotional pricing on domain.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines for the .tel top level domain name, your patience may have been rewarded: eNom is now offering the domains for only $2.99 per year under promotional pricing.

.tel domain names don’t function like normal top level domains. Instead, it’s sort of like a business card on the web. You can upload content such as your contact information, links to other web sites, etc. on the domains. Recently functionality was added to insert Google Adsense ads onto the domains as well.

Will lower pricing spur demand for the domain? It’s hard to tell. The domain was launched a little over a year ago, so the TLD just experienced its first major drop cycle. As of the end of last year about 265,000 .tel domains were registered. And with hundreds of new TLDs coming onto the market in a couple years, competition is about to get much more fierce.

A look at end of year numbers for .tel and .asia.

With .tel recently going through its first annual renewal period, and Telnic’s official numbers for end-of-year 2009, I thought I’d compile some stats on the new top level domain.

Total number of .Tel domains registered as of 12/31/09: 263,304

Top 10 registrars of .Tel domains:

1. Name.com LLC 25,344
2. Mesh Digital Limited (DomainMonster) 24,984
3. Key-Systems GmbH 19,581
4. OVH Sarl 13,699
5. EuroDNS SA 13,606
6. Tucows, Inc. 12,211
7. Network Solutions Inc. 10,139
8. Cronon AG 9,206
9. Dotster 7,970
10. Gandi SAS 7,957

Net adds in second half of 2009: 49,239 (or about 8,200 a month)

Number of operational accredited registrars: 117
Number of registrars going through process to offer .Tel: 246

While we’re at it, let’s examine the numbers for .asia as it enters its third year.

Total number of .Asia domains registered as of 12/31/09: 219,949

Top 10 registrars of .Asia domains:

1. Go Daddy.com, Inc. 30,891
2. EuroDNS S.A. 28,781
3. Key-Systems GmbH 13,808
4. MarkMonitor 6,835
5. Mesh Digital Limited 6,716
6. Cronon AG Berlin Niederlassung Regensburg 6,625
7. Communigal Communications Ltd. 6,402
8. Melbourne IT, Ltd 6,313
9. Directi Internet Solutions Pvt. Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com 6,136
10. Instra Corporation Pty Ltd. 5,339

(Note MarkMonitor, which is a corporate brand management firm. It looks like it registered close to 7,000 domains — perhaps defensively — for its clients.)

Net adds in second half of 2009: 3,482 (or about 600 a month)

Number of operational accredited registrars: 122
Number of registrars going through process to offer .Asia: 123

.Tel domain names get IDNs in June.

Coming soon: Jörn.tel, Júlia.tel, and Bjørn.tel.

.Tel registry Telnic is launching registration of .tel Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in 16 languages on June 15. IDNs will be available in Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

The company plans to launch more IDNs as other languages are approved for IDNs when there is sufficient demand.

Telnic requested permission from ICANN to offer IDNs back in December, and the request was approved in January.

.Tel IDNs will be offered by many of the same domain name registrars that currently offer .tel. Registration costs are expected to be similar to existing .tel registrations. Although registrants can pick their language for the second level, the top level domain will remain the Latin-character “.tel”.

As of the end of 2009, .tel had approximately 275,000 domain names registered.