ICANN44 Domain Conference Report feat. Goran Duskic of WhoAPI
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the authority on domain names and numbers, the institution which approves new gTLDs, IP addresses and all takes care of all the important stuff so you could surf the Internet easily, just had its 44th conference in Prague in Czech Republic.
A lot of interesting stuff happened there (of course, if you’re into domain names like we are), some new patents were announced, many new people have been met. We had a chance to talk to Goran Duskic from WhoAPI, a young Croatian startup who – we dare to say – met one of his idols at the ICANN44 conference. Here are his thoughts!
Startups? Domains!
On his company’s blog, Goran told us of a world where people don’t live from their ideas, investments, startup projects etc. – but from domaining. Professional domaining is what these people do best: while you’re buying a single domain name for your project, there are people and companies which buy several hundreds of thousands domain names, even more! One individual stands out – with its own gTLD applications (54 of them, Goran says).
Frank Schilling is one of the biggest domainers in the industry, whose company Uniregistry is about to cash out $60 million in order to secure those 54 gTLD’s! They’re trying to get TLD’s for stuff like art, auction, fashion, garden, sale, racing, school and many other items you might be interested in as well. Schilling’s portfolio of owned domain names is one of the largest yet and it’s estimated to $500 million dollars worth. And you thought that your 50-or-so owned domain names were a big deal 😉
Schilling, as Goran further explains on his blog, owns a patent called the Generic Top Level Domain Rerouting System. Basically, when a domain name server is provided with a typographical variation of registered domains and when the typo occurs, it will provide an error-correction response. That means, when you enter .Mr instead of .Me, your browser won’t freeze and you’ll be successfully redirected to your .Me site.
I asked Goran about his impressions of this patent:
Type-in-traffic is still getting a lot of money to some people; however it’s a fact that throughout the years the things will change, as well as the DNS patents. Google Chrome made a big difference already using keywords from the address bar as a search query.
This is bad for some people, and good for others. There are pros and cons for everything. An even better example is the .cm TLD (if the letter “o” gets dropped) where .cm is the TLD of the Republic of Cameroon. What happens then? We’ll need a really great algorithm which will assume whether I’m opening a .com or a .cm site.
Final Thoughts
When asked about his impressions of the conference and what he liked the most, Goran said:
The ICANN conference was absolutely fantastic! I asked a lot of attendes after the conference how satisfied were they, and everybody told the same story. They achieved a lot, and were very happy. Some of them even said that this is their best ICANN experience and that there’s a lot going on with the new CEO and new gTLD program.
I personally came back home with 60 business cards, and met people from Tokio, Sydney, London, Johannesburg, Argentina, USA, Canada and many other places. I really felt like Croatia’s ambasador telling people how Croatia is beautifull and how they shoud visit.
Would you attend the ICANN’s conference?
