Domain Incite

I follow domains a bit out of curiosity. I'm pretty bullish on the new TLDs (as a concept), but I would say .com is the only truly safe TLD. It's the only one where an attempt to remove price controls should see a lot of resistance and any other shenanigans will cause outrage.

After that, .net and .org are still pretty safe, but we already saw the first attempt at usurping .org recently. Some of the ccTLDs (country code) look ok if you're a citizen in a developed country. For example, CIRA is a fairly decent registry for .ca (although they seem to have ghosted me after I asked something more than a trivial question of them).

Next is everything else IMO. ICANN and the registries have egregiously mismanaged and squandered every opportunity with the new gTLDs. However, even with that incompetence, the new TLDs seem to be catching on more and more. I think that's an indicator of how successful the industry could be with better leadership.

One of ICANN's primary responsibilities should be to protect registrants from predatory registries. The .storage anecdote in this thread is a good example of ICANN failure IMO. If they want to push adoption of the new gTLDs, ICANN needs to make predictability and risk minimization for registrants their #1 focus.

The second most important thing for ICANN should be to publicize and criticize discrimination against new TLDs. For example, the whole .xyz being blacklisted everywhere that was on the front page a few weeks ago is the…

Not really. The citation you mentioned above itself says, under "Private Auctions" --

> The winner will pay the amount of the second-highest bid, split either equally or proportionally between the losing applicants

And if you look at the news articles from the time that .blog was auctioned -- like http://domainincite.com/17991-blog-won-in-eight-figure-auction-by-primer-nivel -- Minds + Machines, one of the losing bidders, revealed that they had received 3.4 million dollars after pulling out of the bidding for both `.blog` and `.store`

Also, apart from all the above which is public knowledge and there for you to find on your own, I work for Automattic, and when I checked with those who were involved with the .blog purchase, he confirmed that the winning bid was dispersed to the losing bidders. All in all, not a bad consolation prize.

Perhaps you're thinking of EasyDNS?

http://domainincite.com/15538-cops-cant-block-domain-transfers-without-court-order-naf-rules

From the arbitration decision:

"Although there are compelling reasons why the request from a recognized law enforcement agency such as the City of London Police should be honored, the Transfer Policy is unambiguous in requiring a court order before a Registrar of Record may deny a request to transfer a domain name… The term “court order” is unambiguous and cannot be interpreted to be the equivalent of suspicion of wrong doing by a policy agency.

To permit a registrar of record to withhold the transfer of a domain based on the suspicion of a law enforcement agency, without the intervention of a judicial body, opens the possibility for abuse by agencies far less reputable than the City of London Police."

Even that list is incomplete, as it misses the country-code domains. For example, ucl.ac.uk was in DNS sometime in mid 1985 (http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-domain) But DNS registration wasn't the beginning of domain names - before DNS there was hosts.txt and some "new-style" domain names found their way in there before DNS.

This document ftp://ftp.maths.tcd.ie/src/mail/mmdf-Maths/doc/auth.ps from April 1985 by Steve Kille at UCL includes a server log (page 5) that lists hosts in cambridge.ac.uk, rsre.ac.uk, ukc.ac.uk, and rutherford.ac.uk in use all before the domain names were registered in DNS.

Disclaimer: I've had the same cs.ucl.ac.uk email address since I was a student in Sept 1985. Now I'm feeling old.

I'm not generally sympathetic to the "domain investor" types, but this quote from domain investor Rick Schwartz I feel is spot on and has been my thought since "day one" of the new TLDs

> "As we go into the seventh year of the new gTLD experiment, they are meaningless. They haven’t been adopted by almost anybody. Circulation is poor. So many registrations are questionable or penny-promotional. The majority are parked and not in use nor will they ever be. And 99.9% of the people on this planet could not name a single one of them! Not a one!"

Full article: http://domainincite.com/25103-di-leaders-roundtable-4-big-predictions-for-2020