Registry urges brands to get their act together.
With just forty days to go before ICANN opens the application process for new top level domains, Afilias has a warning for brands: this opportunity could be once in a decade.
Here’s how it figures this: If you take one of ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom’s numbers for possible applications (4,000) and consider a delegation rate of 500 domains per year, along with other possible delays, it could be a decade.
Indeed, it could be a decade (if ever) that this opportunity comes up again. But this begs another question: if I apply for my .brand (or other TLD) today and these numbers are right, then I might be waiting around eight years or so for my .brand to be delegated. Ouch.
I personally suspect in this scenario that delegation will happen much faster, especially for .brands.
Of course there’s somewhat of a catch-22 here. By not announcing when the next round will be, ICANN has created artificial demand that will increase the number of brands that will apply for “just in case” reasons, thus making Afilias’ statement more likely. If ICANN guaranteed that this opportunity would come up again in two years, I suspect a lot of brands would hold off.
Regardless of how you run the numbers, if a .brand really wants a TLD in this round then it better get its act together.
Jason Thompson says
You are right about artificial demand. I can see brands who don’t agree with the entire .brand TLD still moving forward with an application because of a “just in case” scenario. It’ll be interesting to see what ends up materializing from this.
David J Castello says
This is going to be historic and we will never see anything like it again within the domain name industry. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this is going to be a fruitless quest for fool’s gold for most of these people. It’s the last cannon shot of the “The Wild West” era of the domain name industry and you will find this business much more regulated after the dust settles and the casualties are tallied.
Silvia says
Isn’t the number of delegated strings per year max. 1000? As of MY understanding the Applications will be processed in batches of 500, however up to 1000 strings can be delegated per year.
Or, when you say “consider a delegation rate of 500 domains per year” what (url) do you refer to?
Thanks
Andrew Allemann says
@ Silvia – that’s my understanding as well. It depends on how quickly they can delegate the batches. My guess is they end up delegating more if they have to.