Fool’s gold Part 5: The onslaught of the zombie TLD
Any TLD that *forces* trademark owners to pay a premium price of $125 per year with a compulsory 3 year registration period, is a few cents short of a Madoff scheme. How many trademark holders bit the bullet and forked out $300+ bucks to ensure that their trademark survived the onslaught of this new zombie TLD?
.tel opened its registration doors yesterday, much to the delight of the salivating domain investors it managed to convince about its usefulness. Through its carefully promoted propaganda videos, which included alluring blondes strolling through the London commuter trains, TelNic is trying hard to conceal the fact that .tel sucks harder than a British-made Hoover.
As expected, when registration opened to the general public at 3pm GMT yesterday, most registrars failed to connect to the TelNic registry as hundreds of requests per second filled up the available bandwidth. I tried using Moniker, Dotster and Name.com – the first one failed miserably to even query .tel availability. It took two identical bulk orders for Dotster to secure my domains – that are still not resolving. Name.com was the cheapest at $8.95 per year and a very smooth registration process and sports a management panel that left me impressed.
So what domains did I register?
My trademark, Acroplex was the obvious one. Although I won’t be able to use it like Acroplex.mobi and redirect it to my .com, at least I will set it up as a “business” card. For the sake of this very blog, I also registered Acro.tel; then my last name, and by then I decided to experiment a bit further – all at Name.com’s low rate of $8.95 a pop. GraphicsDesign.tel was registered for me and VoiceTalent.tel for my brother, who’s a radio producer. I ended up registering a couple more domains to experiment a bit with SEO.
All in all, knowing that I’ll never be able to monetize, resell or build a real web site around these .tel zombies, I was content with my purchases. The ongoing argument about .tel’s usefulness has been turned into a well-placed PR propaganda from TelNic that has its followers and “nay-sayers”.
The best purchase of the day though, was when I registered TelSucks.com
