I was scanning through Technorati today for articles relating to the .mobi domain name extension. I came across one in a particular that caught my attention. But with the following text contained in Right From Left written by Kent, you can understand why it caught my attention.
.mobi - I’m a wannabe cyber squatter. Yes I am.
Well, first off, if you don’t know what cybersquatting (domain names) is, check out the Wikipedia entry on cybersquatting. As a business owner, I’m against cybersquatting, 100%. No exceptions. But if you read on further, here’s what you will see.
I was going to snap up some sweet .mobi domain names this morning and make some big bucks, until I discovered that they won’t be available for public purchase (that’s for you and me) until August 28.
Damn. Squashed by ‘the Man,’ again.
Honestly, because of the sunrise period that implemented a domain name registration hierarchy that relates to the industry (mobile devices and communications), things like this would not happen - just yet.
Lets take a look at the last line of the last excerpt one more time:
Damn. Squashed by ‘the Man,’ again.
If anything, “The Man” which in this case happens to be mTLD CEO Neil Edwards, has economically cost Kent what he calculated to be $75 million in sales of cybersquatted domains at an average resale value of $4,687,500 at , which in my book would have cost him $2,240 to register, plus thousands in legal fees (in which he would lose, since he has no rights to the names, and the names he would have been squatting are intellectual property of multi-million dollar corporations) if he chose to fight for the right to sell rather than surrender the names to their rightful owners.
This brings me to think that sunrise periods keep people and companies (yes, some seemingly legitimate companies do this, too - for their own gain). Lets take a look at the .mobi sunrise period.
Pros:
- Sunrise periods protect the holders of trademark and other intellectual rights to ensure a fair and proper release of the new set of domain names.
- A sunrise period controls and spreads the process of delegating domain names over a defined period of time
Cons:
- Sometimes, companies and/or individuals slip through the cracks.
- Maybe “slip” isn’t the right word. “Allowed to slip” is the more correct phrase.
Currently, the date is May 23, 2006. According the .mobi sunrise and general domain registration schedule, only members of the following organizations should be able to register domain names under the .mobi top level domain.
- AMTA - Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association
- CTIA - Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association
- CWTA - Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
- GSMA - GSM Association
- MEF - Mobile Entertainment Forum
- MMA - Mobile Marketing Association
- NZ Wireless Forum
- RCA - Rural Cellular Association
mTLD estimates that thousands of sunrise application registrations will be coming through within the next few days. Although it happened more with the recent .EU release, I am concerned about the upcoming trademark claim stage known as “Trademark Sunrise”.
An interesting thing that I see when taking a look at the whois results for .mobi domain names is that they post the trademark applied and trademark registered dates. If mTLD follows through and only grants registrations based on trademarks that are a certain age old, they can save a bunch of trouble much like that which arose in the sex.eu trademark application at EURid.
If I were Kent, I would be happy holding on to my money. Kent, economically, forwent the worst opportunity costs and ended up with the best.
3 comments
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May 24th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
xero
You posted a reply to my LJ post about squatting .mobi domains, just thought I’d say hi. Since I didn’t find your email in the eight seconds I took to look I decided I’d just post here. ;o)
I mostly agree with this post, the sunrise period is brilliant and I support it. I used this page ( http://www.eurodns.com/info/mobi/sunrise.php ) to get the sunrise info. It has conflicting information on it so I was confused. They are currently only showing a €24 charge for .mobi domains so I thought the dates were wrong on that page. Knowing the correct dates now I understand why those domains haven’t been snapped up. Explains a lot.
Anyway, I was more curious about how you found that post on my LJ so quickly because I [lightly] try to keep my LJ unsearchable for now. It just struck me as amusing that not only would someone find my LJ but care enough about a half-assed conjecture to reply to it.
May 24th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Steve Castle
The information at EuroDNS is a bit misleading, and I can understand where you got confused. Seemingly they have the .mobi domain name release listed in reverse order (maybe to show general public pre-registration first), which is probably something emphasized by the marketing department.
As for the cost of of the .mobi domain names, I had originally heard $40 USD for general registration. EuroDNS must be running a promotion, or the original general registrataion price that I heard was incorrect, because 24€ is approximately $30.64 at the time of writing this comment. Close, but no cigar.
As for finding you, I was searching Technorati for .mobi, and your site came indexed right about the bottom of the page. When I had found your article it was approximately still two hours old, and subsequently I left the window open - who knew I would have to reference the data further?
Anyways, I’m glad to clarify. Let me know if you have any other questions and keep checking back.:)
May 26th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
kent
Steve,
Good stuff.
Kent