I'm Shocked That There is Gambling Here! - Round Up The Usual Suspects

Piece in  "IT Week" speaks to the .EU landrush. I didn't buy into this landrush. Europe has started two world wars because of nationalism.  You are going to get a .de from the Germans or a .fr from the French when you pry them from their cold dead hands.  My neighbor in Cayman is Italian..  She still converts things in Lira even though the Euro has been around for nearly a decade.  People are proud of their national heritage in Euroland and the domain extension tells folks the language they can expect to find at each destination.

Quote:  “It’s unfortunate that what could have been an enormously successful domain name launch was marred by a number of unscrupulous registrars, who seem to have deterred other firms from registering for the domain,” Turnbull said."

You poor poor man .. If only you could have sold 600,000 less on opening day..  I bet 2 million of the namespace's registrations are held by onesey twosey (or larger) speculators at this very moment..  Only we call those onesey twosey speculators "end users" when it suits us.  Anyhoo, I posted this piece because a great deal of the money which was transfered to the .eu registry operator on the landrush, came from registrars / speculators who made their fortunes in .com ..  this is a great transfer of wealth behind the curtain that few understand.  Much of the money came from .com traffic operators or from those who make their living either selling that traffic or selling names and services to those who make their living in .com traffic.

Just a little color for what its worth.

Quote:  "Phil  Turnbull of web hosting specialist Hostway said the debacle had a detrimental effect on the growth of the domain name."

Either this 'gent' just doesn't understand the ecosystem in which he operates, or he is mugging while the cameras roll. This name-space was doomed without speculators..  Now that they are busy shooing the speculators (money) away.. it is even more doomed.

Again I have no interest in .EU  These are just my opinions. I agree with Rob's comments on an earlier post that one day a rising tide may lift all boats,  but there are other TLD's coming to fill that vacuum.  C'est la vie.

Comments

[al]

You're right Frank: brits use co.uk /french use .fr /germans use .de /dutch use .nl etc. etc. Branding on media is mostly done with cc tld's I have only seen about 2 or 3 .com's in the last 6 months or so in my country.
What most people outside of the European Union simply don't understand is that it's totally different from regions like the United States. People in the EU speak all kinds of different languages and have their very own distinct cultural tendencies. It will take centuries to consolidate something like that, if ever. And don't even try to compare the seperate countries in the EU with the seperate states in the US it just does NOT work like that. Hah .eu was doomed before it even existed!

[Rob Taylor]

There is a reason why .co.uk and .de are massive and .eu is nowhere :)

Between yourself (Frank) and Al above you have got it spot on.

The renewal rates will be interesting to watch!

[RonJackson]

" Now that they are busy shooing the speculators (money) away.. it is even more doomed."

That line brings up something that is a constant irritant to me. Money spent on domains by speculators is always characterized as somehow being a bad thing. If you took the money out of the domain business that has been spent by speculators on all extensions over the years, this whole industry (including registrars, registries, aftermarket sales companies, ICANN themselves with their quarter made from each domain, etc etc) would be about as big as the buggy whip business is today. Yet, so many elements (including some of the very people who benefit mightily from speculative purchases) continually use speculators as a whipping boy. I wonder what would happen if every domain speculator on earth staged a one month walkout and refused to spend a penny? You think the whiners are sobbing now? It would be nothing compared to the wailing and gnashing of teeth you would hear then.

***FS*** Ron, I wish I could articulate things that clearly. Absolutely correct IMO.

[owen frager]

It's true about Europe. I’ve spent a lot of time there doing research for client projects. They are always ahead of the curve and a bellwether for things to come. And my remarks about dotcom on the other threads are made reflecting US businesses.

But I stumbled into something else last night, related as i was repurposing content from de and nl nlogs to mine: Tags. Tags on these blog posts are 1) becoming essential to drive traffic via search (technorati for example) but 2) they help a visitor find related posts on your site (example when they click on the dotMobi tag on any post on my site they get a page of all posts that have been tagged dotMobi . Logs show this to be an increasing trend and a lot of my blog traffic is from Europe.

So what language do we tag in? Is there a business potential in a tag-find-and-translate service? As we become more of a global economy, and one web, isn't there going to be a greater need for a universal language like #'s or symbols (such as they use on airplane safety cards where regardless of age, education or race you know exactly where to go and what to do.