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!
Too good to be true.
Just impossible.
lol
Nice try 😉 I’ve almost believed 🙂
LOL. Theo you should not have added April Fools to the tag.
I am registering G.com and will sell it to Google for about $250 million in stock or cash.(AF NEWS WIRE)
Thanks .. just regged G.com and A.org 🙂
Ha!
gosh I actually believed it.
LOL
The April Fool’s joke is that they WILL be released at 9:45am EST. It’s double psychology. My registrations are already in the ICANNT cache for j.com o.com k.com and e.com !
Yeah right! You almost scam me on this one until I realized it’s April fool. However, I’d still rev-up my computers just in case…Good job, bro.
I’m not taking a chance im spinning them now
thanks for the heads up LOL
good one
April Fools everyone! 😀
Make sure you go to http://icannt.com 😀
Funneeeee. Didn’t buy it for a minute. 🙂
Knew if it were true NO ONE would let anyone else know 😉
Oh to buy Y.com
Good One, I almost believed it ! lol
lol
you almost had me there, but then I realised what day it was.
Nice Try 😀
All gone in under 10 minutes 😀
Nice joke – done well – I have known that it makes NO sense at all
i just believed its open to public. oh i just got fooled. It will be a time when bidders will be active at auctions to submit their bids / successive bids even for 10s of millions
bye.