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November 5, 2008

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This week, ICANN holds a meeting in Caïro. One of the things that will be discussed during this meeting is the price for a personal extension. Right now, the price proposal is the following: if you want to register a personal extension, you need to submit an application. This application will cost €150.000 and this amount needs to be paid as soon as you hand in the application. If your application is rejected and you want ICANN to have another look at it, that will cost you €40.000. If your application is approved, you’ll have to pay €60.000 each year to ICANN to support your extension. If this proposal is approved, a personal extension will cost at least €210.000.

Of course, these prices aren’t final yet and are open for discussion. However it is clear that ICANN wants the personal extensions to be self-funding. An other important remark is that once you’ve paid this €210.000 there are still extra costs. For starters there’s the time you need and the work which needs to be done, before you can submit an application. If your application is approved, a technical name-server infrastructure needs to be set up.

If Flanders wants to register .vla or .flanders, they will also need to set up an organisation that will explote this extension. This is also an extra cost beside the application and the technical infrastructure.

We don’t know the final prices for a personal extension yet but is clear that, if you want your own extension, you’ll need to pay a lot of money.

You can read the complete article on ICANN’s site.

A while ago, the third million .nl domain name was registred at SIDN (.nl registry). So this extension is doing a very good job. According to SIDN, there could still be a lot more registrations under this extension. Surveys show that a lot of people, especially habitants of the Netherlands, are willing to register a .nl domain name but for some reason they don’t.

That’s why .nl registry starts with a large campaign to promote this extension. This campaign will contain leaflets, ads,… and will especially be visual in the Netherlands.

Large companies such as New York Life Insurance and Verzion Communications are protesting against the new personal extensions. They fear that these extensions will offer a new possibility to Internet fraude.

The companies find themselves in a difficult situation. One possibility is that they don’t care about the launch of the new extensions. If they do this, they take the risk that their name is registred under a new extensions by someone with bad intentions. Another possibility is that they register some of the new personal extensions such as .nyc, .bank, .hotel,.. but this will cost lots of money.

According to many people this protest is a typical example of much ado about nothing. Most of the people think that .com is and will remain the most important extension. ‘If people want to find the website of an large company, they’ll always search first under the .com extension,’ says Mr Hittel rom New York Life. ‘Besides,’ he adds, ‘we’ve seen this protest before when .asia and .eu were released. Those extensions haven’t caused the expected problems either.’