[governance] NTIA on certain geographic names...
Chaitanya Dhareshwar
chaitanyabd at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 12:30:06 EDT 2013
I disagree with you on some of this Daniel. While you're right in that a
domain per se has no value - that's like saying land per se has no value,
or proper nouns (eg. New York) per se have no value or like silicon per se
has no value.
Naturally creating the value depends on someone, somewhere - but the fact
is that these things exist and hence can be valued - given a specific
'value' and traded for that value or the value increased/diminished.
The context of amazon.com - the value of that domain name is a static zero.
It's someone else's brand and would thus be inappropriate to 'take' that
(if it were available) perhaps even illegal.
Domain trading is more related to the perceived value of a domain, and not
necessarily actual marketable brand value. Perception that a .COM domain is
better for international business than a .IN domain, or that a .WS website
may prove to be a more effective online platform than other things - purely
perception - and people are willing to invest in it to get that perceived
boost.
If .COM and .IN ceases to exist as such, and you can have anything and
everything - there will be a loss of that perception, and thus a loss of
interest in registering specific more expensive TLDs - which in turn would
result in perceived losses to the root authorities of these domains.
At the same time I do agree that this will result in *tremendous* choice -
and would allow people to have extremely customized domain names - which
does have some value in itself and to the people buying it.
-C
On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg> wrote:
>
> On 10.07.13 15:18, Roland Perry wrote:
>
>> In message <51DD4743.7070805 at digsys.bg>, at 14:36:35 on Wed, 10 Jul
>> 2013, Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg> writes
>>
>>> By the way, domain names (and IP addresses for that matter) never had
>>> any value as such. These are just strings of characters and numbers,
>>> respectively.
>>>
>>> It is the management of the domain that creates any value.
>>>
>> I disagree. What has value is the brand, and the expression of that
>> brand in a domain name has value just as the expression of a brand on a
>> sign over a shop, or $5 worth of paint on the side of an aircraft.
>>
>
> We seem to agree here, despite the difference in wording. What makes any
> brand any valuable is not the 'name', but all that is behind it.
>
>
> >From another perspective, amazon.com is only "good" because of all the
>>
>>> infrastructure behind it.
>>>
>> The "good" derives from the brand behind it.
>>
>
> Well... the brand is only any good, because of of what is delivered, not
> because of it's label. But as much the brand is backed by the delivered
> products and is represented by the brand label, then yes.
>
>
> I suspect it's harder work creating a famous brand when the name appears
>> to have no obvious connection with the trading activity[1].
>>
>
> Good example is SONY.
>
> However, despite being 'good name', SONY would have no value if that
> company does not do what they do -- and have done trough the years.
> Of course a brand of 'SONY' is better than 'Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo', for many
> reasons.
>
> But if for example, they chose to name their company SONAY, then today
> sonay.com would have some value, but sony.com -- probably not.
> This is why the domain name as such has no value.
>
>
>
>> And of course I use the word "trading" in a broad sense. ISOC, ICANN and
>> NTIA are all brands, too.
>>
>> From Wikipedia:
>>
>> "Bezos wanted a name for his company that began with "A" so that
>> it would appear early in alphabetic order. He began looking
>> through the dictionary and settled on "Amazon" because it was a
>> place that was "exotic and different" and it was one of the
>> biggest rivers in the world, as he hoped his company would be.
>>
>> Which is interesting because people complaining about "Amazon" as a
>> pseudo-geographic name probably have in mind "Amazon Basin" rather than
>> just the river itself.
>>
>
> It is also worth noting, that the interpretation of the name is also
> related to the background of those who interpret it. For someone dealing
> with geography and rivers, that Amazon would definitely be the river. For
> the tourist, that would be the 'exotic' area, as you mentioned. Recently I
> found myself with an iPhone app named Amazon... only to discover it has
> nothing in common with the Amazon trading site I expected it to be, but
> with the touristic kind..
> I also believe he wanted to have the connection with 'amazing' too..
>
> But whatever it was, Bezos settled for it and today it is an famous brand,
> particularly tied to it's domain name.
>
>
> [1] Unlike, for example, my current brand and domain name:
>> InternetPolicyAgency; or "MicroSoft" which is an exceedingly generic
>> contraction of "Microcomputer Software".
>>
>> I've always thought that one should strive for a brand which is
>> simultaneously:
>>
>> The company name, an easy to remember URL (for web and email), the
>> marketing strap line, and a plausible description of what you do.
>> One of my earliest in the Internet space was "UK Online".
>>
>> I was influenced a little by Regis McKenna, whose business card in
>> the "Job title" field was "Himself", and I met back in those heady
>> days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Regis_McKenna<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_McKenna>
>>
>
> Yes, it is interesting, that when we create new brands, we do consider the
> Internet domain names. What is even more interesting is that in recent
> times the whole domain name is considered, not just the label. This then
> changes the domain name industry focus, because for example not all
> attractive names end with .com or .net...
>
> Many years ago, we had an request for the domain name aquarium.bg from
> Russia. Since that was an usual (at the time) request, I specifically
> contacted the applicants to inquire and better understand why they were
> interested in an .bg name. Their response was: "We are from the Russian
> rock band Aquarium and we want an .bg name, because we will give the domain
> as a birthday present to out lead singer Boris Grebenshchikov, whose
> initials are BG".
>
> Because of all this, my opinion is that the introduction of many new
> "top-level" names will not destroy the domain industry, it will simply
> provide more choice. People will continue to find creative ways to map
> their brands to Internet names and create new brands using Internet domains.
>
> Daniel
>
>
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