.NAME at a Crossroads

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the .NAME registry is at a crossroads. They say that things are going far from well, and so they have started their own registrar that is going to try to market .NAME domains to individuals, unlike all other registrars. If they don't manage, this will be the first gTLD to go bankrupt. I guess that will put a damper on any plans to introduce more new TLDs."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, I've never even *heard* of .NAME before. Just asked 2 coworkers, they haven't either.

Well shucks, I just can't figure out what the problem is...

I'm too late

[johnburton]

My name has already gone so I couldn't have it even if I wanted it. There is no point having a variation of it either. I can't imagine how they expect this to succeed. There are far too many people with the same names, You need a proper hierarchy for this kind of thing.

Free the namespace!

[Ashurbanipal]

If they don't manage, this will be the first gTLD to go bankrupt. I guess that will put a damper on any plans to introduce more new TLDs.

Hopefully it will only put a damper on plans to introduce stupid TLDs that perpetuate the expensive stranglehold on naming that ICANN enjoys.

TLDs should be available to anyone who can run a secure, reliable root - this connects profit to performance, so we don't have to rely on the innate goodness of the root nameserver operators. The first thing that'd happen would be that pepsi.com, pepsi.net, and pepsi.org would be obsolete since .pepsi would be run by PepsiCo.

With the widespread popularity of search engines, nobody would have any trouble finding anything even if some temporary chaos were engendered.

Spare me the FUD about nameservices not scaling for this; I believe DNS and BIND are quite capable of it.

Advertising? Technical issues?

[Tokerat]

Until this article I had never even heard of a .name TLD. Perhaps if more people knew it existed? Most average people are still stuck on .com anyways. I tell them my website's address, 4am.kicks-ass.net (yay DynDNS), which ends in .net, and they call me up complaining it doesnt' work. Some of them put .com, some of them actually put .net.com, and still others put www.4am.kicks-ass.com. Point being, how many people are going to get bounced e-mails from frank@rizzo.com or frank@rizzo.name.com?

Also, once I get this TLD I need to do something with it. After I pay for hosting or a mail server setup (which is what most people woudl probably want a .name for), this becomes a little more expensive than simply being "gt3trkj3p6@verizon.net"...

Re:Die .name, die!

[Zeinfeld]

You mean I won't get any more .name spam??? Good, let it die! .name was a lame idea anyway.

The problem is the spam. Very few people want to have their cyber identity tied to their email address in such a direct fashion.

The .name zone has about 10,000 Web pages in it. So you can work out the number of domains they have probably sold.

The big problem that the new registries face is that they thought that starting a new domain was a license to print money for doing nothing. They simply did not expect that there might be some actual work involved.

$35 sounds a lot by geek consumer standards, but you need a minimum of 2,000 names to cover the cost of hiring one person at that price - including salary, overhead, benefits etc. You need a minimum of 5 people to provide round the clock support.

The business models of the new domains expected people to buy millions of them in the first year. They did not understand that maybe it might take five years to build a critical mass.

It is always easier to look at someone elses business, particularly a successful one and decide that it is essentialy easy to run and cost free than to have your own idea. Look at all the folk who blundered into etail thinking that the economics of that space would somehow be different to the economics of mail order, a business notorious for its low margins and high infrastructure costs. Or look at the folk who blundered into home delivery of groceries, an even lower margin business, building $30 million distribution centers to serve markets that could not possibly support the interest payments, let alone register a profit.

Folk who have .name domains should not be too worried however. The same thing happened to .tv which spent through its initial VC funding at record pace and was bought out for about a tenth of the amount spent on building the brand. Someone will buy .name, although bidding is not likely to be brisk.