Earlier today I was on a panel at the INTA annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. It’s my first time attending an INTA event, so I’ve been fascinated by it all so far.
The panel was very interesting, as we all came from slightly different viewpoints.
Nick Wood, from Valideus, raised some very valid concerns about dealing with ICANN and also how the advent of so many new domain extensions has had an impact on companies’ approaches to domain registration. (Short version – they aren’t registering as many domains defensively)
Sheri Falco, from ICM, talked about how ICM were dealing with brands, but also went on to talk about how people are using .porn domains for non-adult content (think about “food porn” for example).
Andy Abrams, from Google, gave an entertaining and enlightening example of how domains can help app developers. Of course since Google are running the .app registry it was an obvious example to choose.
Stacey King from Amazon registry gave some interesting insights into the various factors that need to be assessed if a company is planning on moving to their own TLD. While it was obvious when she said it, it’d be very easy to overlook things like ensuring that SSL certs work properly for your own TLD. She also gave some really interesting examples of use cases for new TLDs, including assigning a domain to each car that a brand might sell.
As you can see from my slides I was more focussed on trying to explain what registrars and hosting providers can and cannot do and the consequences of taking certain actions. Put another way: the role of intermediaries. Of course once things opened up for discussion the conversation was a lot broader and hopefully interesting for the audience
Here are my slides:
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