The .BEST price drop

Not so many people are using domain names ending in “.best” yet. The reason for this is its price at the registrar: up to €112 per year at some registrars when a “.com” often costs below €10. The Registry recently changed hands and is adapting, offering a serious price drop.

Registration Price will be divided by 10
This promotion, effective 1st November for 3 months, is a good news: many users have been requesting the registrars to lower its price and this is just about to happen. The .Best registry, in its wish to go to the market, has decided to offer a promotion for “.best” domain names. The price will be:

1. Divided by 10 (wholesale registration price)
2. Lower than a “.com”
3. Available for multi year registrations: it means that it will be possible to register the domain name at this special price for up to 10 years at some registrars.

.BEST in SEO and SEM

At the moment, my Registrar wants to charge me €88 for a single year of registration but such price, even if already low compared to other registrars, is still too high for me and I want to register a “.best” domain name for the simple reason that “best” is a very strong keyword when it comes to promoting a business, and also because it benefits the SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Moreover, according to a study from GlobeRunner, .Best domains beats .com domains in SEM (Search Engine Marketing) having a Better CTR (Click-Through Rate) and a Lower CPC (Cost Per Click).

All .BEST Names are “still” available
What is great with this promotion is that .BEST has actually a low volume of domain names on the market (around 3,000 domains in total). This makes “.best” domain names a fantastic opportunity for Registrars, Trademarks and domain name investors. For example, many industries are covered with generic keywords available for registration: consulting.best, umbrella.best, perfumes.best, teeshirt.best, skirt.best, cards.best, sunglasses.best, expo.best, desk.best, equity.best, cryptocurrencies.best, homeloans.best … As a wine fan and producer, I will probably be looking for short names in that direction.

Note that such price will only be available during the promotion period starting 1st November of 2018 and ending in 31st January of 2019 (right after the Namescon 2019).

The ".IDN" new gTLD to change to ".INTERNET" ?

An application for a .IDN new gTLD was submitted to the ICANN in the first round of the ICANN new gTLD program. It appears that this Indian company, named Nameshop, had the ICANN applicant support to result with a "did not meet all criteria" so it can't be delegated. It then requested the ICANN to change its string to .INTERNET to allow the creation of domain names ending in ".internet" (instead of ".com" for example).

What the application says
The application says that "the purpose of the proposed gTLD is to offer a bridge for the Internationalized Domain Name Registrant to connect to users beyond their own language communities. This gTLD would be of help in furthering the Internet Communityʹs efforts to preserve the Internet as a unified, Global space". Right.

Changing a TLD to another?
I personally do not understand how domain names ending in ".idn" will help offering a bridge for the Internationalized Domain Name Registrants to connect to users beyond their own language communities, but as long as the string does not belong to the strings ineligible for delegation (2.2.1.2.3 of the Applicant Guidebook (AGB)) or the list of reserved names (2.2.1.2.1 of the AGB) ...why not. Unfortunately, "IDN" is an alpha-3 code listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard and the AGB says that applications for strings that are country or territory names will not be approved if a string sis considered to be a country or territory name (2.2.1.4.1 of the AGB): "IDN" stands for Indonesia.

For me the story ends here with this application because another applicants applied for an alpha 3 code string in the first round of the ICANN new gTLD program and I don't remember that he was offered the opportunity to discus changing his string to another. I also read the applicant guidebook many times and did not find anything about the possibility to modify a string. To me this demonstrates one thing: ICANN is flexible.

Is the .INTERNET new gTLD coming?
I personally doubt it but Nameshop asked the ICANN for a meeting (PDF download) to discuss this in the next ICANN meeting in Barcelona this coming week: "to request that the GDD and ICANN Leadership continue to actively consider delegation of .INTERNET and keep in mind the usefulness and value of .INTERNET -- operated in tune with Nameshop’s Public Interest Commitments".

The ICANN Vice President of gTLD Operations seem to have confirmed this meeting (PDF download) to discuss this application.

Do you imagine domain names ending in ".internet" offered to the general public?

Schedule of Working Group and new gTLD Work Track 5 Meetings

ICANN63: Schedule of New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP Working Group and Related Meetings.

Working Group and Work Track 5 Meetings:

1. GNSO - New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Work Track 5 (Geographic Names)
   9:00 - 13:15, Sat, Oct 20, 2018 -- 117 GAC)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901599
   Agenda wiki page: https://community.icann.org/x/shVpBQ
2. GNSO - New gTLD Subsequent Procedures (1 of 3)
   13:30 - 15:00, Sat, Oct 20, 2018 – 114 (ccNSO)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901662
   Agenda wiki page: https://community.icann.org/x/IBZpBQ
3. GNSO - New gTLD Subsequent Procedures (2 of 3)
   15:15 - 16:45, Sat, Oct 20, 2018 – 114 (ccNSO)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901663
   Agenda wiki page: https://community.icann.org/x/IBZpBQ
4. GNSO - New gTLD Subsequent Procedures (3 of 3)
   17:00 - 18:30, Sat, Oct 20, 2018 – 114 (ccNSO)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901664
   Agenda wiki page: https://community.icann.org/x/IBZpBQ

Related Meetings:

1. GAC: New gTLDs Work Tracks 1 - 4
   9:30 - 10:15, Sun, Oct 21, 2018 -- 117 (GAC)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901602
2. GAC: Geographic Names WG/WT5 Discussion Meeting
   17:00 - 17:45, Sun, Oct 21, 2018 -- 117 (GAC)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901610
3. Middle East Space - Applicant Support Program for the new gTLD Subsequent Procedure
   10:30 - 11:45, Mon, Oct 22, 2018 -- 116 (ALAC)
   Remote Participation: https://63.schedule.icann.org/meetings/901573

Meet with the Trademark Clearinghouse

Join us this Sunday in Barcelona to meet the full #TMCH team, discover the new #TREx service and enjoy the Spanish hospitality. Register via: https://t.co/Dwp0MYcfuV #ICANN63 pic.twitter.com/G8u0wVvwgM

— TMCH (@tmchinfo) October 16, 2018

People don't have .FAITH but still go to .CHURCH (with their .BIBLE)

Church-goers dont't have .FAITH so much anymore and .CHRISTMAS does not seem important; but they like a good .WEDDING and still go to .CHURCH with their .BIBLE. See no offence here but today, a .CATHOLIC has an advantage on .ISLAM and the Muslim moral (the .HALAL new gTLD) in the new gTLD world.

The Vatican
The Vatican was pretty much present in the first round of the ICANN new gTLD program: it applied for four Top-Level Domains: .CATHOLIC plus 3 others in 3 different scripts which also mean "catholic": .天主教 - .католик and the .كاثوليك new gTLD.
A use was found for the .CATHOLIC Top-Level Domain and 13 domain names were created (October 2018). Note that no website is visible nor indexed on Google yet using domain names ending in ".catholic" or any of the 3 other scripts. Only websites such as https://whois.nic.catholic/ can be accessed at the moment.

Islam and Halal
Very recently, an Independent Review Process (Asia Green IT System vs ICANN) declared, in accordance with Article IV, section 3.21 of the applicable version of the Bylaws, that the Board directs the President and CEO, or his designee(s), that the pending application for .HALAL and the pending application for .ISLAM not proceed. There are domain names ending in ".catholic" but there won't be domain names ending in ".islam".

A few figures
The .FAITH Top-Level domain lost 3,000 registrations in one month but it still has almost 10,000 more domains - for a total of 63,271 registrations - than what it had in the beginning of the year, in January 2018.

Two TLDs keep growing in numbers: the .WEDDING and .CHURCH new gTLDs never lost registrations since January 2018:

1. 26,700 domain names for .WEDDING
2. 23,300 for .CHURCH

Is Christmas coming?
The .CHRISTMAS Top-Level Domain lost nearly half of its total registrations since January 2018 and dropped to 1,660 domain names. Will that change in December?

Mormonism
The MORMONs and their .MORMON new gTLD still have not created any www.directory.mormon or www.temple.mormon domain names and stick to one single registration. It is the same for the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church) and its .LDS new gTLD: there is still no use. Wouldn't a www.church.lds be welcome?

The Christian Broadcasting Network
Same here with one single domain name registration. The .CBS Top-Level Domain has a lot of potential to me: the front page shows generic strings such as "shows", "news", "living", "video", "radio", "kids" and "ministries". I would certainly dig in that direction.

Read the report here.