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April 16, 2006
Whining About the .EU Landrush is a Joke
Some people have gotten all bent out of shape over the .eu 'land rush' process, claiming that the system was gamed or that they were somehow disadvantaged (hah! I'd love to see what it is exactly that constitutes when a millionaire who lives in the U.S. could qualify as disadvantaged when compared to a kid in Chad or Sudan) when their company doesn't even offer internationalized domain names (those names that use extended characters like µ, ä, æ, or ñ). The US centric viewpoint espoused by these people is really silly and leads to some interesting opportunities in the marketplace.
For instance, I now own Älexander.com, Älexander.net, and Älexander.org (which isn't a correct spelling but is certainly much better than Alexander11365.com and besides using extended characters is l33t) which were all available due to the failure of the major US registrars to offer support for extended characters during the last internet name ownership rush. So, now .eu domains are available. At last count well over 1.5 million of them had been registered. And how many of those utilized an extended character? Mmmmm okay, I don't know BUT I'm willing to bet not many. Certainly none that were registered to GoDaddy.com because they refuse to support extended characters... why did they choose to ignore a chunk of the market that's only going to grow? Anyway, getting back to the new domains... Alexander.com was first registered to its current owner in 1994, meaning that I had little to no chance of grabbing it. But, with support for extended characters a whole new range of domains becomes available, and even though people (in the US) aren't used to using ALT+#### keyboard combos to type I suspect that given time 101-key keyboards will begin to offer pre-programmed shortcuts for extended characters. Even if they don't, people outside the US, whose language isn't confined to the basic Latin character set, already have keyboards with these characters. The US is just 4.65% of the world population; we can't expect to dominate the character sets that are used even if we currently dominate the internet. Eventually, second and third world countries will be wired and will be online. At that point, our keyboards will support common extended characters (how else are you going to type the name of your outsourcing firm in Latvia?). It may take 15 years, but I'd rather wait 15 years for an investment to pay off than never to have had the opportunity at all.
So, the guy from GoDaddy who bitches that the .eu 'land rush' was rigged can go pound sand. The people who organized the sale knew what would happen and knew that it would benefit them and their friends. It's a friggin' monopoly, that's to be expected. To find opportunity you have to look beyond the immediate, obvious, payoff. If GoDaddy supported internationalization of domain names, and had a list of internationalized domains to register during the 'land rush,' I guarantee that they would have had a higher rate of success. For now, I'm going to search for interesting domains that are still available. After all, the Swedes and Norwegians have plenty of money to buy cool addresses from me and they make abundant use non-US characters in their language.
Posted by ashusta at April 16, 2006 12:32 AM
Comments
It's wrong for a governing body to take unfair advantage of people they are responsible for supporting. It seems like you understand this, and possibly even agree. However, please don't just shrug your shoulders, snicker, and move on. Sure, Bob Parsons has a personal interest in what happens, but he's still right. Something should be done.
Posted by: John at August 2, 2006 01:53 PM