What ICANN won’t tell you
There are certain real-world considerations that ICANN won’t touch. Market research resources, information from ccTLD registries, even a timeline from Minds + Machines. These and other materials collected below.
Useful Non-ICANN Materials
- Community Scoring in ICANN’s Draft Applicant Guidebook: How to Make Sure that New Top-Level Domains Are Meaningful and Useful. Our white paper advocating loosening ICANN’s restrictions on what constitutes a community, and the good things that flow from that.
- New ICANN TLD Timeline. Our latest best guess on what will happen when. Downloadable PDF on our timeline page.
- “The Perfect Sunrise”. A handy guide to the different approaches to designing your Sunrise Period (or variation), required by ICANN to protect the rights of trademark holders. Edited by Nick Wood of the Intellectual Property Constituency of ICANN.
- Nominet Domain Name Industry Report 2008. Thorough report (with a stunning design), covering the world-wide domain name industry. Useful for basic market research.
- 2008 French Domain Name Report (in English, 116 pages, 5 MB). An extremely comprehensive and well-produced document covering many areas of interest. Focused on France, but should be useful to anyone doing market research.
- VeriSign February 2009 Domain Name Brief. VeriSign’s widely read domain name fact sheet.
- Study of the Factors Behind the Demand for Country Code Domain Names. Study by Matthew Zook for the APTLD October 2007. There’s some actual science here, and interesting conclusions that will help you with investors (or give you comfort if it’s your money).
- Dotandco.net has lots of data on ICANN registries and registrars. As well as a very nice numbers-based view of the registry and registrar markets, you can see historical data — how well did other registries do at launch? CENTR, the European ccTLD managers group, publishes a magazine called DomainWire, which has some interesting articles as well as glossy fluff about CENTR. They also have a bunch of statistics, which are unfortunately not made available to the public.
- The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), one of the providers for ICANN’s Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure, publishes statistics on UDRP cases and disposition.
- Matthew Zook keeps great stats on the Internet. General gTLD stats show growth rates over the years.
