[At-Large] Is the .FOOD poisoned?

bzs at theworld.com bzs at theworld.com
Wed Nov 16 02:33:16 UTC 2016


On November 16, 2016 at 01:32 evan at telly.org (Evan Leibovitch) wrote:
 > 
 > 
 > On 15 November 2016 at 23:28, <bzs at theworld.com> wrote:
 >  
 > 
 >     I don't think policy should be driven on a guess at the likelihood
 >     that a gTLD might be desirable to end-users or not.
 > ​
 > Why not?​ So far gTLDs have been given out based in guesses that they'd be
 > financially stable. There was no market analysis before the expansion round to
 > deminstrate either demand or viability, so it's all been driven on guesswork so
 > far.

That's a whole different kettle of fish.

>From what I can tell there just wasn't all that much concern whether a
gTLD registry was long term financially stable, only short term. They
had to show sufficient financials to get started.

There is the "Continued Operations Instrument":

   https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/coi-2015-09-28-en

which aims to, as the name implies, continue registry operations in
the event of failure.

And EBERO, the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator.

  https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en

But ok those are responses not predictors.

We shall know more about all this in the fullness of time. And
probably not a lot of time, another couple of years.

 > 
 > There is an interest that the world of non-domain-buyers and non-domain-sellers
 > has in the landscape of the DNS. Arguably that is EXACTLY what the bylaws
 > mandate At-Large to advance and advise.

What? That they need to have an interest in gtlds they have no
interest in?

I guess that's roughly what COI and EBERO are.

 > 
 >  
 > 
 >     Also, I don't know of any of these .BRAND gTLDs which are doing
 >     anything out in the wild other than creating SLDs for their products
 >     or marketing campaigns such as next100.bmw. Which is fine but that's
 >     not what's being discussed here vis a vis .FOOD.
 > 
 > 
 > ​We don't know. What we do know is that the open ones, with VERY few exceptions
 > (ie, dot-bank and maybe dot-ngo) have a ​singular business model, mostly based
 > on tonnage of domains sold.

Yes, but we're talking about the closed ones and looking for any
examples from them giving a hint how they might operate.

  Q. What's the difference between elephants and giraffes?
  A. They all have long necks, except for the elephants.

 >  
 > 
 >     Has any closed TLD actually offered registration to end users?
 > 
 > 
 > ​They have to be careful how they do it, let they run afoul of the registrar
 > lobby, er, constituency. Personally, I'm hoping that Google walks this path
 > because it's consistent with how it's disrupted other fields such as email and
 > productivity apps.

Personally I expected Sony to do something with their very successful
Playstation brand.For example offer all their online players a domain
for their game console for example probably for a price, or a coupon
in the box, perhaps as part of product registration.

 >  
 > 
 >     There're a lot of RSN speculation or puff pieces on why this is going
 >     ​ ​
 >     to be so great.
 > 
 > 
 > ​Don't know about great; right now the bar is low enough that I'll settle for
 > interesting or unusual. I do hope that a few of them break out with innovative
 > ideas of how to use (and monetize) bits of the DNS. Dot-food, as being one
 > potential branch of a large media company that already works in print,
 > broadcast and streaming, has a legitimate potential for innovation. Whether and
 > how Scripps takes advantage of that is anyone's guess.
 > 
 > But whatever they pick, and whether it succeeds or not, it will be more
 > innovative than yet one more goldrush and sunrise and pool of speculators.

Or more of what we've seen which is mostly nothing, other than perhaps
one website per Food Network Show or personality which will probably
just be a link to their existing website. If even that.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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