ICANN rulings lands Big Biz with $75k yearly fees

ICANN's decision to add more TLDs means at least one group of dotcoms will be able to put bread on the table this holiday season - domain name registrars.

Companies such as Network Solutions and Register.com stand to make big bucks, Gartner Group claims. Especially with the addition of Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters, and last week's ICANN ruling to allow another seven suffixes into cyberspace, including .info, .biz, and .co-op.

It all translates to cyber-heaven for domain registrars. Meanwhile, Gartner reckons that organisations will have to register a minimum of 300 Internet addresses to cover their backs by 2001.

"Being in 'dot-com' does not mean you are 'dot-done', said Audrey Apfel, Gartner VP and research director.

Gartner's advice is to batten down the hatches and get a domain-naming strategy "with multiple names registered in multiple registries". And the cost of this strategy per company? $75,000.

It should include:

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• Marketing and branding issues for existing and future initiatives and products
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• Legal exposures and liability
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• Misspellings of prefixesv
  
• Related sentences like "ihateXXX" or "XXXsucks"v
  
• Domains beyond dot-com
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• Non-English language variants of name, such as Chinese
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• A process to look at new TLDs, products, acquisitions and mergers. Yearly cost - $20,000

• "The addition of these seven new high-level domain names by ICANN is only the tip of the iceberg," warned Apfel. "Organisations must register names in multiple registries for both offensive and defensive purposes, but with the knowledge that no-one can cover all the options." ®

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