Newly appointed ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom posted a message today on the ICANN website with updates on a few key topics. Beckstrom discusses IDNs, DNSSEC, New gTLDs, and the future of ICANN and the Internet (albeit briefly).

Regarding the new gTLDs, Beckstrom notes the original memorandum of understanding with the US Government from 1998, which stated, “Oversight of the policy for determining the circumstances under which new top level domains would be added to the root system.” New gTLDs are definitely going to be introduced, and I hope ICANN is prepared to handle everything associated with new companies entering the registry business.

In the message, Beckstrom cites a letter from the chief of the Zulu tribe who intends to move forward with the .Zulu extension. It’s great that this could open the Internet to groups who want to manage gTLDs, but I can’t  imagine enough companies wanting .Zulu domain names to run a viable business on .Zulu. Hopefully there will be plenty of measures in place in the event that a registry fails. I digress because it’s not really the point, but there are a whole host of issues to consider.

Anyhow, I applaud the openness Beckstrom is showing, and I hope to see it continue.

I just registered to attend the upcoming ICANN gTLD meeting in New York City on Monday, July 13, 2009. There is no cost to register for the event, and I recommend that domain owners in the New York area attend the meeting.

This may be the last chance to express your opinion, as a domain name owner, about the IRT and URS proposal. At the very least, it’s a good opportunity to meet ICANN leaders and learn about how ICANN works.

Here are the details for the NY Meeting:

Date: July 13, 2009
Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Hudson Theatre, Millennium Hotel – (145 West 44th Street, New York, NY)

If you can’t make it to the NYC meeting, other meetings are scheduled for locations around the world, including London (July 15, 2009), Hong Kong (July 24, 2009) and Abu Dhabi (August 4, 2009). Again, it’s free and easy to register online.

Not only was Mayor Ed Koch one of the best mayors New York City has had, but he is also a philanthropist and has a great sense of humor. Today, Mayor Koch announced his support of DotNYC.net and DotNYC LLC for the .NYC gTLD. In addition to a press release, the team from DotNYC LLC, which includes CEO Antony Van Couvering, released a video of Mayor Koch, which can be viewed below.

While the data can be skewed because there is no cost to reserve a gTLD domian name using Pool.com and Quintaris’ system  to reserve gTLD domain names before their registries are even created, the companies are indicating that the market for gTLDs is strong. According to the companies, 10,000 gTLD domain names were reserved every day during the first month in operation.

An interesting observation that was noted is “Early results show a stronger market for generic-named registries, like .sport than for those being pursued by a specific city or region. Farrow noted that “no city gTLD has cracked the top ten on the pre-order list.” This doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a market for geo names in extensions like .nyc, but it shows that generic categories like .sport or .sucks are popular.

If you have any interest in reserving a gTLD, I think this is the place to do it. There’s no risk – although there’s no guarantee either. I haven’t reserved any gTLD domain names yet, but I might – just in case.

Many months ago, I interviewed DomainTools founder Jay Westerdal in one of the first “5 With…” interviews I did. Since then, Jay sold his company to Thought Convergence, which has moved right to the top as one of the domain industry’s leading companies. Their services run the gamut – parking (Trafficz), conference (Domain Roundtable), domain auctions (Aftermarket.com), tools (DomainTools), and many other products and services.

Jay is also involved in another project as CEO of the .movie registry, which hopes to secure the .movie gTLD. The general premise is that every year, hundreds of movies are released via different channels, and many struggle to match the .com domain name with the title of their movie. The .movie extension would allow production companies to choose the name of their movie in the .movie extension. An example of this would be that Paramount Pictures could register StateOfPlay.movie instead of the dumb domain name they chose, StateOfPlayMovie.net.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Antony Van Couvering, founder of Minds + Machines, a gTLD consulting company, and CEO of .NYC. If you have any interest in gTLD domain names, that’s another interview you might want to read.

EJS:1) Who is involved in .Movie and are there any movie studios involved as partners or passive players?

JW: We have talked with a number of studios so far and they like our vision. There are six major studios which we have a good working relationship with at this point and expect that to grow. We have raised or got commitments for just over $5 Million dollars from Investors and we might be interested in raising more. I am not going to mention the investors by name but most people reading your blog would recognize their names. Our vision is very clear. We want to create a namespace where movie goers trust that they can direct navigate to a movie just by knowing the name of it. BacktoTheFuture.movie would work in this situation along with every other example of a movie name. We are going after two TLDs .Movie and .Film and with one registration the registrant would get both domains.

EJS: 2) Will the .Movie registry have a directory of .Movie sites classified by genre, release date…etc?

JW: No, we are a pure registry with no special tools. We will leave organizing the world’s data up to smart people like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or the like. We want to be just a TLD for movies. Every movie should have a type-in domain at our registry with no speculators allowed.

EJS: 3) Will the .Movie registry offer special development tools for website owners?

Nope, we offer nameservers for the TLD and the things you would expect from normal TLDs like .COM or .INFO. Just the basic DNS stuff along with a ultra strong UDRP which favors studios.

EJS: 4) How will .Movie compete with Movie.com/Movies.com?

JW: We are not competing with Movies.com, we are a TLD for movies. Every domain in our TLD will be owned by the movie owner. We are not operating a website, we are enabling direct nav websites for movie studios. I think the vision for this started because I was a domainer with a lot of ICANN experience, I got frustrated looking at trailers for new movies coming out and seeing that they had horrible domain names. So I decided I would help the movie industry and create a TLD
just for them with no outsiders allowed in to clog up the good domains.

EJS: 5) Do you expect to run a TM landrush, and how will domains be awarded, ie CasaBlanca.movie where a TM might not be valid?

JW: We expect Warner Bros. Pictures will register Casablanca.movie. We are not encouraging registrations inside this space unless the registrant owns film rights to a movie of the same name. We will present big hurtles to register in the space and we expect only a few outsiders to come in, domains like Google.movie might actually go to the Google search engine which indexed the movies rather then a film about Google.

Our goal would be to allow movie companies to register great names like Ducks.movie for just $10. Keeping speculators out will require the mind of a domainer because we want to keep the space open for anyone but only encourage movie studios and special edge cases like search engines. We would not want Google coming in and registering Search.movie they should be using their trademark instead. Generic domains would go to a studio that had a film named Search or The Search. Unless you had a trademark in the space don’t expect to come it. Even with a TM we know there are loopholes like registering TMs just to come in and speculate; we will guard against that and throw speculators out. More information can be found on our website www.dotmovieregistry.com.

EJS: 6) How long do you think it will be until we see these type of gTLD approved by ICANN?

JW: I expect this TLD to be approved in 12-24 months and operating in the root.