[placename].im update

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I found out today a little more information about the .im domain situation I was talking about. I heard back from the guy selling the peel.im domain about the price he was asking for, and also heard back from the registrars about their policy on reserving names relating to some places but not other.

If you're interested in buying the domain for Peel, Isle of Man - peel.im - then you are looking at paying around $1000 (he's "willing to let this one go pretty cheaply"). That's only about 11 times the price it was purchased for. It does seem a shame to have this domain taken away from the people of Peel, and it's a shame that it was allowed to happen, but perhaps he's not broken any of the rules.

It's not for me to say what's right or not about the registering of that domain, but I would like to help prevent it happening to other domains that relate to place names on the Isle of Man. The registry inform me that the place name domains that appeared to have been reserved have not been reserved because they are placenames, but because they have been offered to the owners of the third level domains (e.g. castletown.im reserved for the owners of castletown.org.im) who have until the end of September to claim their domain (costing only £5 initially). After that date, if the second level domains haven't been taken on by the owners of the corresponding third level domain then the domains will be released to the public.

With no policy in place to hold back the names of towns and villages that hadn't previously been registered, I think it's important that something be done to protect them.

Perhaps there should be more publicity on the Island (not being there at the moment, I don't know what publicity there has been already) to convince local authorities that they should invest in their name on the internet. Perhaps for some places, names should be reserved by Isle of Man Tourism or by Manx National Heritage. If these organisations don't pick up on their relevant domains, perhaps there should be a sort of Open Domain project to help protect those domains? I'd donate a domain to that sort of project if others were to do it too.

[stepping down from my soapbox for now]

Posted in Isle of Man at 11:10 PM on Monday 11 September 2006
Tags: .im domain .im domain isle of man

Comments

Protecting a domain is a noble idea, however if you start looking at all the variants one could register, it can turn into a pretty costly exercise. For example, would registering peel.im be enough? What about peeltown.im or hereispeel.im or cometopeel.im.

The truth is that, domain sharks will try to capitalise on available domains by purchasing them speculatively, but holding a domain has a yearly cost. Eventually, when no commercial value can be attained, then will be released back to the public domain. In the meantime, we'll have to rely on search engines to point us at relevant content. If you search for Peel, you'll hit http://www.peelonline.net/ which has pretty much all the information you could need about Peel.

Posted by: Owen Cutajar at September 12, 2006 10:50 AM

This is EXACTLY why I created the OpenDomain project. You are correct that it is very expensive - some of the big domains cost quite a bit. If you have any domain to donate, please let us know! In two weeks we will have a very BIG announcement about what we are doing and how we will stop these squatters. If you want to learn more, contact me directly on my website. Here is a hint - what is your favorite CMS (NOT the software do you use to blog)? What domain did you download it from? Have you tried a more obvious top level domain? You will be able to use it soon! (If you guess, please keep it under wraps until the press release)

Posted by: OpenDomain at September 17, 2006 12:38 AM

Owen, I'd say that just the placename .im domain would be enough. I agree that search engines would be the main source of information, and the very informative peelonline.net site is realtively highly ranked, but domains are used for more than just the web. Emails would be so much prettier if you had an address @peel.im for example.

Looking forward to the Drupal announcement, OpenDomain :)

Posted by: Dan Karran at September 27, 2006 8:44 PM

We have the press release:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060929/phf010.html?.v=61

We are also on Drupal.Org:
http://drupal.org/node/86768

Posted by: OpenDomain at October 6, 2006 3:27 PM