[At-Large] - Price caps - was: The Case for Regulatory Capture at ICANN | Review Signal Blog

[bzs at theworld.com]

On June 28, 2019 at 17:03 karl at cavebear.com (Karl Auerbach) wrote:
 > 
 > On 6/28/19 2:36 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
 > 
 > > Here's another, anecdotal datapoint: I have been involved in the 
 > > Internet for nearly as long. But it's been helping family, friends, 
 > > small businesses, colleges, religious institutions, and refugees in 
 > > camps. I've worked with entrepreneurs both new and established, 
 > > struggling to make a presence on the Internet and finding that their 
 > > first 20 choices were only available at an aftermarket premium. The 
 > > result is that they either had to:
 > > 
 > >   * change their brand name to suit the available names (this has
 > >     happened more than once)

Similar: The masters of this are in Hollywood. As far as I can tell
they'll do anything rather than pay someone so find something like
X-MENFILMS.COM (catchy, no? that's real.)

And the drug companies who just come up with ever more bizarre
drug-sounding strings like VYLEESI and EVENITY (those are both real
and have .COM sites.)

 > >   * agonize over whether to settle for a domain name using hyphens

I've heard from the kids on the street that hyphenated names are
popular in much of East Asia because if your native language is
Chinese or Japanese (etc) you have a lot of trouble parsing a string
like penisland.com.

 > Regarding hyphenated or even non-semantic names - Anyone these days who 
 > depends on humans making semantic sense out of a domain name is living 
 > in days of fading glory.  Search engines, especially when embedded in 
 > browser address bars, have long ago started to diminish the use of 
 > domain names as carriers of semantic content.  And the rise of 
 > application handles such as facebook or twitter names has diminished 
 > that further.

The canned response to that has become:

  Once they find it via search it's good if the domain is memorable
  because if they search again they might find your competitor.

And there are other media from bizcards to billboards.

I've seen printed ads and TV ads which try to say search for something
or other rather than try to remember our domain (etc) but, again,
you'd better not have any very similar competitors.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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