Seventy-nine percent of respondents in an ICANN-sponsored survey reported awareness of the top three legacy top-level domains -- .com, .net and .org -- ICANN said Friday. Ninety percent of respondents in the survey claimed to trust the .com, .net and .org TLDs, with North America, South America and Africa reporting the highest trust numbers, ICANN said. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they had a high degree of trust in domain name registries, which they based on perceptions that those entities will take precautions and give consumers “what they think they’re getting,” ICANN said. Only about 46 percent of respondents said they were aware of at least one of the new generic TLDs (gTLDs), with 65 percent of those respondents saying they had visited a website with a gTLD extension, ICANN said. Only 49 percent of respondents said they trusted websites containing one of a set of gTLD extensions, ICANN said. The nonprofit said it surveyed 6,144 consumers representing 24 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America and South America.
Public Interest Registry (PIR) said it’s making .ngo and .ong domains available to “validated” nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations as part of its OnGood online services. PIR said it’s selling .ngo and .ong domains, reflecting the English and romance language abbreviations for NGO. The domain landscape “has become increasingly cluttered, making it difficult for Internet users to determine which organisations are truly trustworthy,” said PIR CEO Brian Cute in the Wednesday news release. “After speaking with more than 16,000 fellow NGOs and nonprofits in more than 40 countries, we learned that credibility was one of their biggest challenges, so we developed OnGood to be part of the solution.” PIR said its other OnGood services are meant to strengthen NGOs’ “online presence, improve visibility, and better connect with supporters.” To qualify for OnGood membership, an NGO must prove it acts in the public interest, is strictly nonprofit-making, has limited government influence and is actively pursuing its mission, PIR said.
GoDaddy said it bought from another entity the domain name GDDY.com, which will now redirect visitors to GoDaddy’s investor relations page. GDDY is GoDaddy’s stock ticker symbol. “We knew the majority of people typing in GDDY.com would want to know more about the company, so it made sense to get the name and point it to our Investor Relations page,” said GoDaddy General Manager-Domains Mike McLaughlin in a Thursday news release. “When we saw what the GoDaddy stock symbol was going to be and knowing how important this would be for them, we immediately began the acquisition process for GoDaddy," said Monte Cahn, president of domain consulting service Right of the Dot. It advised GoDaddy on the purchase.
HongKong.com and Taiwan.com are on sale for the first time in two decades, Domain Holdings Group said in a news release Monday. The domain names are available through DHG’s brokerage team, it said.
Four million domain names were added to the Internet in Q4 2014, said Verisign’s domain industry brief released Thursday. The Q4 additions brought the total number of registered domains to 288 million globally, it said. Such registrations have increased by 6.2 percent year over year, it said. Registrations for .com and .net in Q4, ended Dec. 31, combined for a total of 8.2 million, the same as Q4 2013, Verisign said.
Domain registry Donuts’ 150 active new generic top-level domains have had more than 1.2 million registrations, said a company news release Tuesday. Those gTLDs account for almost 33 percent of the 4 million registrations for all new gTLDs, it said, marking the one-year anniversary of new gTLD general availability. Donuts’ most registered gTLDs are .guru (80,584), .photography (51,431) and .email (48,031), it said.
OnGood, a nonprofit and nongovernmental organization domain service, will enter general availability May 6, said the Public Internet Registry, which oversees .org, in a news release Wednesday. OnGood will provide a bundle package for .ngo and .ong, as well as a search database, it said. The 30-day sunrise period for OnGood begins March 17 and limited registration April 21, said PIR. The sunrise period will allow organizations that have trademarks registered at the Trademark Clearinghouse to register for the bundle package, it said.
Tuesday was the beginning of the one-month sunrise period for generic top-level domains .vote and .voto, the Afilias-backed Monolith Registry said in a news release. The period closes Feb. 12, and the domains will be open for general registration Feb. 17, it said. The new gTLDs are “designed to provide a positive and respectable environment for voter interaction,” Roland LaPlante, Afilias chief marketing officer, said.
Google Domains is available to anyone in the U.S., the company said in a news release Tuesday. After Google began beta-testing the service in June, domain and financial experts told us the service could disrupt much of the domain name registrar industry (see 1406250099). Google supported domains include .bike, .democrat and .industries (see full list here). Google users outside the U.S. can sign up to be notified when Google Domains becomes in available in their country (see notification system here).
New generic top-level domain .poker will enter its sunrise period Feb. 5, said the Ireland-based registry provider Afilias in a news release Thursday. The sunrise period for .poker, which is available only to “eligible trademark holders,” will close March 7, it said. Afilias launched a one-month sunrise period for .lgbt Monday, said a company news release.