What’s the future of .US? What effect are new TLDs having on legacy domains? Find out in this podcast.
Neustar has lots of experience with non-.com domains. It operates the registry for .co, .us and .biz, and is also the back end registry provider for a lot of new TLDs. On this episode, Neustar VP of Registry Sean Kaine talks about these top level domains and how he sees the internet naming landscape changing in the coming years. What’s the future of .US? Why is .Co still growing in the face of new TLDs? And how is Fox thinking about using its .fox brand domain? We also discuss key topics at next week’s ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires, including what effect Fadi Chehade’s resignation will have on the meeting.
Also: real estate domain names, typosquatting and stock sales.
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“Fine tune” who the audience for .US is and try to get to them? Targeting groups that already have an affinity?
What I’m hearing is a completely accepting attitude of the status quo, a complete unwillingness to target the real audience for .US – the whole country. I’m hearing that the plan is for more of the same since day 1. Don’t rock the boat, don’t seek to be disruptive or game changing, accept that .com alone is the king of the US, the United States. And the speaker actually sounds happy and content with this attitude and strategy, though he otherwise certainly sounds like a decent likable guy who is probably just following the directives and the ethos of his employer. Happy and contented with a miniscule piecemeal approach to seeking continued comparative and accepting obscurity for .US.
Unreal.
And that’s been the problem since day 1 for .US, even since before its release, which I remember well.
I remember reading Bob Parsons’s blog a long time ago when he was still very much at the helm at Go Daddy, and he was expressing thoughts about business strategy and so forth, and sharing issues that led to its success. One thing and one thing only in particular had stood out completely as the pivot point – when how despite that Go Daddy was already relatively well known and popular at a certain earlier stage, they were nowhere near where they would eventually be. This was before the game changing event of the first Super Bowl commercial. And that one thing which was the heart of the matter was that despite that status it already had, people still didn’t know that Go Daddy even exists. It was that realization that changed everything, and led to the Go Daddy that we know today.
And it is exactly that fundamental reality that keeps .US what it still is today 13 years after release – when you can still go to all your normal relatives and friends here in the US who are not already deeply into online commerce, publishing and domain name investing the way we already are and simply ask a question with “.US” in it or if they even know what “.US” is, and expect to virtually always be asked “.US? What’s .US?” here in the USA.
So the message the gentleman’s words in this podcast conveys is, just expect more of the same, because that is what our, i.e. Neustar’s, intentions are. And of course, every once in a blue moon there may be the occasional obscure event or two that would purport to indicate otherwise, such as the “.US Public Stakeholder Town Hall” of April 22, 2015.” And how many people even in the industry itself even heard of that one then or since no less? More of the same since April 2002 – that’s what we just heard in this podcast.
No comments here yet?
If they want .US to be adopted more focus on URL shorteners and they should introduce some sort of privacy option.
Neustar should run an Internet Official like contest for .US imo. Seems like their focus is on .CO now as startups like it.
Well after hearing this podcast — the last thing the speaker should boast about is being a “visionary”. It sounded a lot more arrogant and lethargic than it did adaptive and reasoning. Let’s face it — there is just no sense of leadership for the .US TLD. They keep using the same argument that .com is the default .US TLD. It will always be, if you keep using that as an excuse.
Yes, that’s certainly a farce. The purest of unpurified bull spit.
I have a strong hunch that it is by design, plain and simple. It’s not like anyone has not known from the beginning what would be needed to spark some real interest and public awareness. But if .US actually became something people in the US even knew existed, and even cared, then that would or could threaten some very big things. So occasionally the company makes a little show purporting to care or that they have even lifted a finger on behalf of .US, like the perverse example of a labor union representative who has to make it look like they are going through the motions of fulfilling their legal duty of representation while selling you out in the process. So my hunch is that you have a few people at the top at Neustar who have been given their marching orders from outside the company, to maintain the status quo of near total apathy and obscurity for .US, while everyone underneath just falls in line as they were hired to do or drinks whatever Kool-Aid comes down to them from the top.