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domainguru
28th January 2011, 07:02 AM
Which "new" iGTLDs do you expect VeriSign to apply for come the summer?

I am assuming each one will cost $185,000 to apply for @ ICANN, and VeriSign makes about $7 per domain per year right? But I'm not sure how much the annual ICANN fees are - anyone fill me in? The annual fee seem much more important than the one-off application fee.

Anyway, VeriSign would need to process close on 15K domains a year to get $100K per year from a TLD, so that would seem like a good starting point. How many scripts currently have 15K plus domains in .com or .net. Probably not that many ..............

Who has got those figures for current IDN regges in different scripts? Might help us work out which VeriSign will apply for in the first wave. Of course upwards trends are important as well.

BTW, I found these stats:

http://www.idnnews.com/?p=9592

But the blog was published about 14 months ago, and the actual stats from the zone files could well be much older than that?

Quite importantly, what happens to those TLDs that aren't applied for? For example, if VeriSign applies for .com in a script but not .net, the locals will likely flock to .com (in their own script) and totally ignore .net (still in ASCII), which could lead to ".net limbo" i.e VeriSign ignoring it -> locals ignoring it -> VeriSign ignoring it -> ad nauseum.

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 07:11 AM
I would guess as many scripts as are already in the Root when the application opens.

domainguru
28th January 2011, 07:41 AM
I would guess as many scripts as are already in the Root when the application opens.

How can that make commercial sense? Are you really saying a script with, say, 100 domains in it is going to get the "application treatment" from VeriSign? $185,000 app fee + tens of thousands of $$$$$ of annual renewal fees? VeriSign has shareholder does it not? ;)

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 08:08 AM
How can that make commercial sense? Are you really saying a script with, say, 100 domains in it is going to get the "application treatment" from VeriSign? $185,000 app fee + tens of thousands of $$$$$ of annual renewal fees? VeriSign has shareholder does it not? ;)

In a country with a Trillion Dollar Deficeit $185,000 is not exactly a huge amount of money.

Besides there are not that many actual scripts being put into the Root.

Cyrillic cover the entire former Soviet Union. Arabic cover not only Arabic put Persian and Urdu. OK Thailand needs its own, but I am sure you would attempt to justify that one. Azeri would simply be .com.

Lokai
28th January 2011, 08:57 AM
Is anyone here actually happy at the potential to pay double for the IDN extensions? I don't want to pay twice. Anyone think about this as another issue? How many IDN owners are going to actually register the new extension?

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 09:27 AM
Frankly, I don't think this is even going to happen, but if it does, then you only need pay for the version you want to use. You should only pay twice if you feel you need both.

domainguru
28th January 2011, 10:42 AM
In a country with a Trillion Dollar Deficeit $185,000 is not exactly a huge amount of money.

Besides there are not that many actual scripts being put into the Root.

Cyrillic cover the entire former Soviet Union. Arabic cover not only Arabic put Persian and Urdu. OK Thailand needs its own, but I am sure you would attempt to justify that one. Azeri would simply be .com.

Well no its not a huge amount of money, but VeriSign is a private company isn't it?

You might be right about the limited number of .com aliases that need adding ... hardly seems worth the trouble does it ;-)

FWIW, here's the ones (in no particular order) that come to mind:

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Hebrew

Have I missed any obvious ones???

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 11:34 AM
Well no its not a huge amount of money, but VeriSign is a private company isn't it?

You might be right about the limited number of .com aliases that need adding ... hardly seems worth the trouble does it ;-)

FWIW, here's the ones (in no particular order) that come to mind:

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Hebrew

Have I missed any obvious ones???

I would have thought Bangla would be a higher priority than Greek. Tamil is also likely to be out there. Telugu and Kannada are other candidates.

555
28th January 2011, 11:47 AM
Chinese Arabic Russian at minimum for the first possible group.

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 11:55 AM
I think the thing you are all forgetting is that the costs of setting up and running a one by one aliasing of dot com is going to far outweigh the actual extension registration fees. To get the best economies of scale they are going to want to think pretty big in terms of supported extensions.

Of course if they actually go for a DNAMES type solution where the extension is mirrored globally the costs come down a lot, but there is no possibility of charging extra. However, it should be noted that in most cases, most registrants will only want one extension. The one that actually matters in the market place.

Verisign should be seeing this as an opportunity to globally extend their brand, not an opportunity to disenfranchise their customers by making a quick buck.

domainguru
28th January 2011, 12:01 PM
I think the thing you are all forgetting is that the costs of setting up and running a one by one aliasing of dot com is going to far outweigh the actual extension registration fees. To get the best economies of scale they are going to want to think pretty big in terms of supported extensions.

Of course if they actually go for a DNAMES type solution where the extension is mirrored globally the costs come down a lot, but there is no possibility of charging extra. However, it should be noted that in most cases, most registrants will only want one extension. The one that actually matters in the market place.

Verisign should be seeing this as an opportunity to globally extend their brand, not an opportunity to disenfranchise their customers by making a quick buck.

I don't believe for a minute most registrants will "only want one". In the spirit of "Don't make me think" (for the website visitors), most registrants, ones running websites at least, will want .com in ASCII + their local language.

If you are saying they will "just want one", you must be saying the IDN-version. If you weren't, there would be no point to aliasing .com into other languages.... one day maybe, but in the interim, website owners will expect (some) of their visitors (+ browsers + other software ) to add ".com" to the domain, not the new IDN version. It will be evolution not revolution.

Which website owner is going to "turn off" ASCII .com ..... only website owners not making any money from their website I guess.

555
28th January 2011, 12:04 PM
We heard the verisign CEO explaining they plan to go for

"The IDN versions of .com and .net, expect us to bid on all of the transliterations for .com and .net, i think that's ______ for the company"

I can't understand this one word, maybe someone else can: around 58th second here:
http://www.screencast.com/users/davegkl/folders/Jing/media/cce9337f-0b4c-424e-bb3f-82c35a608b55

So the intentions are clear and the reasoning is even more but still, after taking hits from all over the place for the past 10 years, i don't want to be optimistic or wrong so i stick to these three languages.

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 12:14 PM
I don't believe for a minute most registrants will "only want one". In the spirit of "Don't make me think" (for the website visitors), most registrants, ones running websites at least, will want .com in ASCII + their local language.

If you are saying they will "just want one", you must be saying the IDN-version. If you weren't, there would be no point to aliasing .com into other languages.... one day maybe, but in the interim, website owners will expect (some) of their visitors (+ browsers + other software ) to add ".com" to the domain, not the new IDN version. It will be evolution not revolution.

Which website owner is going to "turn off" ASCII .com ..... only website owners not making any money from their website I guess.

Well if ICANN had done aliasing in the Root then none of us would be paying for extra extensions. The sensible way would have to be allow Verisign a small hike across the board to compensate them for the extra fees.

But as ever with Americans, you can expect Greed to come before Profit. Asian businessmen are likely to be a lot less short sighted.

domainguru
28th January 2011, 12:15 PM
yeah, that's a really tricky phrase to work out. Presume its some waffle like "an essential opportunity" but who knows as I certainly can't hear it.

Also, no idea what "all the transliterations" means ..... he probably doesn't either ....... I certainly don't believe it will be every script represented in current IDN.com's. VeriSign won't shell out $100K annual renewal fees (that's a guess, I still don't know what gTLD ICANN renewal fees are) for a script that only has a thousand or less domains regged.

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 12:23 PM
yeah, that's a really tricky phrase to work out. Presume its some waffle like "an essential opportunity" but who knows as I certainly can't hear it.

Also, no idea what "all the transliterations" means ..... he probably doesn't either ....... I certainly don't believe it will be every script represented in current IDN.com's. VeriSign won't shell out $100K annual renewal fees (that's a guess, I still don't know what gTLD ICANN renewal fees are) for a script that only has a thousand or less domains regged.

Of course it may well be that Verisign feel compelled to that protect their brand. Not applying initial might be seen as weakening their claim.

sbe18
28th January 2011, 07:15 PM
I think transliteration...he may have meant com for Japanese and Hebrew...on the similar sounding etc...

translation for .com relative to Chinese is the company and gongsi issue...and 'transliteration' is basically meaningless as we have discussed before...

1.85 milllion for 10 won't break the bank for 2012....



russian, arabic, hebrew, japanese, korean, hindi ++,
thai...

you guys are sitting pretty....
s/

mulligan
28th January 2011, 07:25 PM
Stats were current at that time and I'm fairly sure I posted updated stats here?... Expect an update on this shortly as I wanted to give the Russian launch time to *settle*


BTW, I found these stats:

http://www.idnnews.com/?p=9592

But the blog was published about 14 months ago, and the actual stats from the zone files could well be much older than that?

Rubber Duck
28th January 2011, 07:31 PM
yeah, that's a really tricky phrase to work out. Presume its some waffle like "an essential opportunity" but who knows as I certainly can't hear it.

Also, no idea what "all the transliterations" means ..... he probably doesn't either ....... I certainly don't believe it will be every script represented in current IDN.com's. VeriSign won't shell out $100K annual renewal fees (that's a guess, I still don't know what gTLD ICANN renewal fees are) for a script that only has a thousand or less domains regged.

Disambiguating:

Essential Opportunity = Get Out of My Face. Can't You See I am Busy!

JamesZ
28th January 2011, 11:52 PM
Verisign has made it clear that they will apply transliteration versions (similar in sound) of .com for all the languages. These are the things they are sure they will get. Verisign will not apply for the translation versions (similar in meaning) of .com for two reasons.

Firstly, not matter .com means company or commerce, the translation of the two words will have more than one applicants. Verisign has no advantages. Decision on which applicant would get it can take a very long time, which will slow down the globalization of .com. Verisign certainly does not want to see that happen.

Secondly, the transliteration version of .com, even sounds like meaningless, funny or ridiculous (i.e. the one in Chinese), is actually the best to go for.
An established brand is an image known to many people. It is not just the words in written form, but also the sound. Some people in China (like my parents) may not even know how to write .com, but they know how to pronounce it because they have heard it many times. Both the written form and the sound form have great value to a brand. Aliasing .com to a translated version will not only lose a lot value in an established brand, it will also take much effort to make people to realize the connection. It is almost like a complete rebranding since you give up both the written and sound form. Ask any Chinese, do they know what does .com mean in Chinese? 99.9% of them do not know. They do not think .com means either 公司 (company) or 商业 (commerce). On the other hand, the transliterated version gets recognized immediately and will be accepted over time.

I am using Chinese as an example since that is what I know.

555
29th January 2011, 12:11 AM
I believe that is the case for Russian and Hebrew as well, Except it sounds great and used daily, Doesn't sound or have a meaningless, funny or ridiculous connotation.

In Russian it isn't only the transliteration, but actually the same meaning also
Com = Commercial
Ком = Коммерческий

In Hebrew it is the transliteration:

Com = קום

A search in google for either ком or קום will show how much it is used when in fact they don't even own these names due to lack of idn's (back then)

Avtal
29th January 2011, 02:25 AM
To try and figure out what Verisign might mean by "all", I started with Verisign's list of scripts (http://verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domain-name-services/domain-information-center/idn-resources/scripts-languages/index.xhtml), which contains 35 scripts:

Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bopomofo, Canadian-Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherokee, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Gurmukhi, Han (Chinese, Japanese, Korean ideographs), Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Khmer, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Mongolian, Myanmar, Ogham, Oriya, Runic, Sinhala, Syriac, Tamil, Telegu, Thaana, Thai, Tibetan, Yi

Then I went through Verisign's list of language tags (http://verisigninc.com/assets/idn-valid-language-tags.pdf) (this is the list of languages you are asked to choose from whenever you register an IDN .com).

With a little help from Wikipedia, I was able to determine that most scripts in Verisign's script list have a corresponding language in Verisign's language list.

The scripts that don't seem to have a corresponding language are:

Bopomofo, Canadian-Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherokee, Ethiopic, Kannada, Ogham, Runic, Yi.

I was surprised that the Kannada and Ethiopic scripts did not have corresponding languages in Verisign's list, since these scripts are both used by major languages. But maybe I just missed them. Another inconsistency is that the Verisign language list includes Coptic, but the Verisign script list is missing the Coptic script.

Anyway, based on my count, there were 35 scripts in the original list, from which we can subtract the 8 scripts above; we can also subtract Latin from the list of scripts, since it is already represented by .com.

That leaves 26 scripts that Verisign needs to register a .com equivalent for, if they truly mean "all" scripts. (Plus perhaps Kannada and Ethiopic versions, and Blast From the Past will want to add .kom).

If I remember right, the application fee is $185K per script, plus an annual fee of $25K per script. Given the rates at which large corporations charge internal labor, it will probably cost Verisign less money simply to register all the scripts than to have a bunch of internal meetings to decide which scripts to eliminate.

Avtal

P.S. If Verisign really does mean "all", that would be good news for my Georgian and Armenian .coms.

domainguru
29th January 2011, 03:45 AM
Nice post Avtal, don't forget VeriSign is in charge of .net as well, so you can double the effective estimate.

So to apply, 26*2*185000 = $9.6 million
And annually: 26*2*25000 = $1.3 million

So yeah, not a massive amount for VeriSign to expand .com / .net globally

squirrel
29th January 2011, 05:52 AM
They just sold the security bizz

Nice post James about transliteration vs translation.
Posted via Mobile Device

Rubber Duck
29th January 2011, 07:09 AM
My personal guess is that they will go for Transliterations whilst asking for Translations to be blocked as being confusingly similar. The first is really theirs by right, the second is likely to get plain messy. But Verisign don't really need them. They just need to keep others off their turf. The will be looking for a sharp, clean and effective solution, not a 100 years war with the goverments of major markets.

blastfromthepast
30th January 2011, 03:51 AM
.kom

Avtal
30th January 2011, 04:55 AM
Secondly, the transliteration version of .com, even sounds like meaningless, funny or ridiculous (i.e. the one in Chinese), is actually the best to go for.

Interesting. What would the Chinese transliteration of .com look like? Is there a transliteration that is generally used?

Avtal

Rubber Duck
30th January 2011, 09:51 AM
Interesting. What would the Chinese transliteration of .com look like? Is there a transliteration that is generally used?

Avtal

Don't know but if they manage Coca Cola, then it shouldn't be that hard.

bwhhisc
30th January 2011, 12:25 PM
Interesting. What would the Chinese transliteration of .com look like? Is there a transliteration that is generally used?

Avtal

Don't have the link, but this was from a Verisign document that gave “examples” of possible transliteration equivalents

.com transliteration: Company
Simplified Chinese 公司 xn--55qx5d
Traditional Chinese 公司 xn--55qx5d
Japanese 会社 xn--6oq404h
Korean 회사 xn--vf4b131b
Arabic ش xn—zgb
Swedish affärshus xn--affrshus-2za

.net transliteration: Network
Simplified Chinese 网际 xn--ur0a138b
Traditional Chinese 網絡 xn--od0alg
Japanese ネット xn--9ckkn
Korean 통신 xn--zv4b74y
Arabic ك xn—fhb
Swedish nät xn--nt-via

We made a list up here on the forum a while back for many languages with input from a lot of members if I can find the link.

bwhhisc
30th January 2011, 12:36 PM
IDNF members list;
.com and .net possible translations and transliterations.
Corrections, additons, and other suggestions welcome.

Chinese:
.中国 : .cn
.公司 : .com or .회사 : .com (2 suggestions from members)
회사 and 公司 being translations of the meaning of com (meaning company or commercial).
.网络 : .net or .网际 : .net
公司.中国 = .com.cn
网络.中国 = .net.cn

Korean:
.한국 : .kr
.컴 : .com (needs to be 2 symbols I believe)
.회사 : .com
.넷 : .net
.기관 : .org
.통신 : .communication
.컴 : .computer

Japanese:
.日本 : .jp
.コム : .com
.ネット : .net
コム being transliteration of com

Russian:
.ком : .com
.нет : .net
.орг : .org

Bulgarian:
.БГ : .bg
.Инфо : .info
.име : .name

Thai:
.คอม : .com
.เน็ต : .net

Hebrew:
קום : .com
נט : .net
ארג : .org

Arabic:
كوم : .com
نت : .net
اورغ , اورج : .org
نطاق : .domain

Greek:
com : .κομ
net : .νετ

Hindi and Marathi and Nepali (All Indian languages)
.com : .कॉम
.net : .नेट

Urdu (India, Pakistan, Afghanistam, Iran)
کوم.com

Telugu (India)
కం.com
నెట్.net

Tamil (India)
.com : .காம்
.net : .நெட்

Kannada (India)
ಕಂ.com
ಕೊಂ.com

Gujarati (India)
કોમ.com (xn--0dc4c9d.com)
નેટ.net

Malayalam (India)
കോം.com
നെറ്റ്.net

Bengali (India)
কম.com
নেট.net

Latin languages
.com : .com
.com : .kom (latin letters)

JamesZ
30th January 2011, 12:55 PM
Interesting. What would the Chinese transliteration of .com look like? Is there a transliteration that is generally used?

Avtal

I saw 康姆 in one of their presentation files, but could not find the file any more. This name is possible because Chinese version of Viacom is 维亚康姆. 维亚 is for via and 康姆 is for com. In fact, aftering seeing some more examples by googling 康姆, I do not feel it is strange any more. :)
That would be my prediction and I think it will be accepted pretty quickly and become a popular word.

squirrel
30th January 2011, 02:46 PM
you are quick Bill