Acro.net - Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

In an unprecedented late-night meeting that lasted well into the early morning hours of April 1st, ICANNT members emerged from the organization headquarters in Arlington, VA with the big news: all single letter .com/.net/.org domain names, will be released effective today, 9:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time. When the clock strikes 9:45 all names will be released on a first-come, first-served basis; the price will be the standard registration fee (plus $0.25 handling fee per domain to cover ICANNT overtime costs.)

Only 26 such letters, per TLD, exist on the entire Internet thus making them extremely valuable.

This obviously comes as a shock to many domain investors and corporations like Overstock or Yahoo! who held high hopes of registering trademarks with “O” and “Y”, respectively before claiming the single-letter domains in a public auction, as it was announced last year. These companies were willing to invest tens of millions of dollars in this partially untapped namespace, so far owned by literally a handful of entities, such as Quest - Q.com, Nissan - Z.com, Paypal - X.com, X Org Foundation - X.org and Thunayan Khalid AL-Ghanim (Elequa) who owns I.net.

As the news came in, we rushed to inform a few influential individuals in the domain industry. Among them, Jerry Floski of Metadata Data Corp, Andrei Dimitriev of Bulgarian Domain Exports and Olga Hollander of Out of TIME & Space Magazine - all of which expressed both excitement and shock at hearing the news.

“At 9:45am, Internet history will re-write itself“, Hollander said.
“It’s a chance for me to grab the big ‘O’ although I am sure Oprah Winfrey will be trying to register it at the same time!“, she added.

No major domain outlets have been notified yet as there will be intense competition that would enable speculators to charge hundreds of dollars in fees. It’s certain though that major registrars, such as eNom and GoDaddy will be fighting tooth and nail against Entertainment Yesterday and Gayest Media respectively, to secure ownership of “E.com” and “G.com”.

While .com is still king, it is expected that the lesser .net and .org TLD’s will be registered as well within minutes of the 9:45am landrush - after all, that’s only 73 domains that in the early days of the Internet one would have hand-registered in a few hours, all while enjoying a slowly-roasted cup of java connected via Compuserve at 300bps. This time however, it will be considerably tougher to register more than one such domain via the special registration portal designated by the Registry.

Good luck everyone!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 1:49 am and is filed under Business, Domains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.