C’EST LA VIE…

Paris threatens US citizens over domain names

Paris entices millions of tourists every year with the Eiffel tower, Louvre Museum, gorgeous food and beautiful architecture. Yet the cities recent behavior does not reflect its fine, elegant image.

A recent law case saw Paris fined multiple times, in some cases up to $100,000 for sending threatening letters to US citizens who registered the domain name ‘.Paris’ and ‘.Parvi’ (Paris’s free wifi system).The United States government, top lawyers and citizens from both countries have taken sides and despite Paris being an internationally recognised capital city – it lost the case!

Darwin and Domains!

The evolution of the internet really is the ‘survival of the fittest’

As you may have seen on the news, internet crime is on the rise. Despite the US ICE recently removing 839 imitation websites for selling counterfeit products and the Ukrainian authorities seizing the world’s largest illegal music sharing site (Demonoid), recent figures suggest companies need to adapt.

Let’s take a look at this. We recently saw, credit checking firm, Experian, reveal figures suggesting online fraudsters have exchanged as much as 12 million items of personal information only in the first quarter of 2012. That’s a 300% increase since 2010! You can read about this here: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240159690/Online-identity-theft-is-up-300-on-2010-warns-Experian.

What are GTLDs?

If you are reading this, you are one of the 2 billion plus internet users worldwide. With such a large number of constantly growing internet users, ICANN (the owners of the internet) have decided to create many more website address suffixes. For instance, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com already exists but soon there could be anything from Amazon.shop to Amazon.solar or even “amazon.amazon”.

These suffixes are called GTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains) and at present there are 22 of them. In a few months however, there will thousands of them! The idea is that, although Johnsmith.com and johnsmith.biz are useful, johnsmith.law says a lot more about John’s business. So: these names are about benefiting consumers and promoting brands. ICANN opened up the internet and for the princely sum of $185,000 brands and companies were able to apply for their own GTLD for their brand.

You can see the list of successful applications and new GTLDs here.