I’ve decided to go for my own ICANN extension and compete with .com
June 24, 2009 by Rick Latona · 21 Comments
Greetings from Sydney Australia.
What’s amazed me about this current ICANN meeting is the sheer number of companies and individuals lobbying for their own extensions with ICANN.
Last night we went to a party, hosted by Wolfgang Puck and the good people over at Mind and Machines. Chef Puck is going after .food. Are the restaurants all going to line up for these names? We’ll let the market decide.
Or how about Shaquille O’Neil applying for .basketball? Maybe with his bankroll, it doesn’t matter if you drop half a million on it just to see what would happen.
Therein lies the issue. For many corporations and high net-wealth individuals it really doesn’t cost that much money to secure your own extension. At least, not in the grand scheme of things and not if ICANN finally gets the initiative launched.
The meeting has a very Washington DC feel to it. There are lobbyist everywhere. Even though any extension with two bidders will enter an auction, most companies are openly promoting the extensions they are going after. One would think that is their way to getting competitors to shy away from going after the same one.
More likely, these companies are putting on an aggressive lobbying effort. There in-your-face marketing puts their wannabe babies on the forefront of the ICANN board’s minds.
I guess you can’t blame them. If you want to get your extension passed it is a good way to go about it.
Therefore, I’ve decided to apply for my own extension. My idea is so huge and ground breaking that you may want to open a savings account now to be ready to snatch up my domains during my land rush period.
It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime ideas that will be a game changer. Starvation will no longer be a global problem. Everyone, everywhere will have clean water. Cats will play with dogs. It will stop raining in Vancouver and the Cubs will win a World Series.
Are you ready for the idea?
dotICANN
Yep.
.icann
You could have politics.icann, lobbying.icann, painfullyslowandtediousmeetings.icann, wheredoesallthemoneygo.icann and of course, the super premium travel.icann. These boys and girls do love to travel after all.
Seriously folks, there are not going to be dozens of new extensions or even hundreds. Expect thousands of extensions over the next 5-6 years.
It’s a land rush of a new and different order.
Heading back from Spain. What a wonderful time. What great people.
May 5, 2009 by Rick Latona · 7 Comments
I’m returning from the Domaining.es forum in Valencia, Spain. What a great trip. The people, the country and the city have been fantastic.
I’ve never been invited to stay in someone else’s home so often. This was the most hospitable and welcoming group of individuals I’ve come across in some time.
From the beginning I was welcomed with open arms. Unless something significant comes up, I’ll return next year for sure.
Special thanks to (and in no particular order):
Dietmar J Stefitz (my host with the most)
Daniel Dryzek (and his lovely wife)
There were 40 more people there but I’m afraid I didn’t get all of their business cards.
The .es extension is going to do very well with this group of people as the early adopters.
50 thousand Americans shaking in their boots sounds like… Domainers beware. Obama is about to get America paid.
May 4, 2009 by Rick Latona · 5 Comments
I’m not one to regurgitate news articles as blog posts but this one is relevent to the domain community.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that Obama’s administration is going to crack down on offshore tax avoidance in a big way.
Many domain companies, fortunately not my own, have setup offshore operations. I wouldn’t want to be them right now.
From the article:
“President Barack Obama will flesh out a proposal included in his February budget blueprint seeking to curb the practice of parking foreign earnings in offshore tax havens indefinitely. By some estimates, $700 billion or more in U.S. corporate earnings have accumulated in overseas accounts in recent years.
The plan to be announced Monday will go further. It aims to change the legal treatment of offshore subsidiaries and structures that companies have used to avoid not only U.S. taxes, but taxes in other developed countries as well.
In addition, the administration will strive to tighten rules that have encouraged thousands of Americans to open offshore bank accounts in an effort to duck U.S. taxes. The plan would increase information reporting and tax withholding as well as penalties, and make it harder for foreign account-holders to win cases in court. The administration promised new enforcement tools to crack down on tax-haven abuse.”
Valencia bound. I really wish I had practiced my Spanish before this trip.
April 30, 2009 by Rick Latona · 7 Comments
I’m off to Valencia today for a small but I’m sure worthy meeting of domainers in Spain. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and relaxing a bit.
While we are still pushing our extended auction and will be working through the nights closing deals on the remaining names from the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show in Santa Clara it is also time to focus squarly on Amsterdam.
So here I go to Europe to rally the troops.
No sign of a bad economy at Disney World. Mickey Mouse is making a lot of cheese.
March 18, 2009 by Rick Latona · 4 Comments
After a week at Disney I’m glad to be home. It was fun though. One thing is for sure, The Walt Disney Company got plenty of my family’s hard earned money.
With the main resort hotels fully booked and 45 minute or more wait times for the major rides, it is hard to imagine they could be struggling.
This time around we had a really great time, though. In the past, Disney has caused more family stress than it has cured. It was always unnecessary stress as well while the kids were young enough that they would have been satisfied with a simple trip to the beach rather than something as elaborate as a 6 day park hopper pass. And it doesn’t have to be a big trip to the Hawaii Islands to make them happy.
At 9 and older though they can ride most of the rides. We had a really great time. Their newest park, Blizzard Beach was probably the biggest hit. The little one even had the guts to go down the Summit Plummet, which scared the hell out of me.
Here’s a video of her getting off the ride: p3130015
Check out my view of the Inauguration
January 20, 2009 by Rick Latona · 8 Comments
7:00 A.M. Woke up
8:00 A.M. Left for the event
8:45 A.M Got in line
11:00 A.M. Still in line and kicked out because Pennsylvania Avenue stands between me and the security gate. Then president elect’s motorcade was coming through so if you weren’t in you weren’t getting in.
11:30 A.M Back at small rented apartment.
11:35 A.M. Sitting on the couch watching it on t.v.
Even Mariah Carey couldn’t get in. She was about 20 feet from me in the line. I tried to take a picture but couldn’t. It was so cold and packed it was really miserable.
At least I won’t get behind on emails now. At least Obama is in office and Bush is out. At least I got this watch.
Look out history, here I come! Did I mention I’m an Obama fan?
December 19, 2008 by Rick Latona · 5 Comments
You know your kids go to a good school when a U.S. Senator donates tickets to the presidential inauguration ceremony. I just won the tickets at a charity auction.
That, however, was the easy part. The hard part is going to be finding somewhere to stay. I’d really rather not stay outside of Washington D.C. and everything decent appears to be booked.
If you or someone you know lives there and wants to rent their place out, let me know. Now I have to look for transportation.
Looking for com in a Muslim World
November 3, 2008 by Rick Latona · 2 Comments
Walking the streets of Cairo reminds me a bit of Asian countries. Without Roman and Greek letters on signs it is nearly impossible to understand things other than familiar logos. I have no problem navigating streets in French, Spanish or other European countries but Arabic, Japanese and the like make you feel like you are truly on another planet.
While there may be .com and .eg (Egypt’s ccTLD, not a gTLD for examples) signs on the street, I haven’t seen any yet.
Of course I’ve also been wandering streets in a jet lag induced stupor. I arrived after an eight hour flight to Amsterdam and a nine hour layover in the same city. I woke up Sunday at 14:00 hours, just in time to go to the Egyptian museum on my one day off and stand in line until the museum closed. In fact, I haven’t really done anything here yet.
Today, however, marks the start of another ICANN conference and my first in eight years. I’ve got a big agenda and many things I want to accomplish this week. Fortunately, most of the signs in the hotels and airports are in English.
Pig butt anyone?
July 10, 2008 by Rick Latona · 7 Comments
You have to admire a country with such a passion for ham, or Jamón to be correct in Spanish.
Here in Madrid you can really splurge on the tasty asses of swine.
I personally prefer the jamón ibérico which is taken from Black Ibérian pig which eats only acorns while roaming oak forests between Spain and Portugal. It’s a romantic thing to think of them hobbling around eating nuts waiting to be slaughtered. It’s romantic because in the States it’s usually the abused animals that taste the best like baby calves that hang in the air on ropes and are never allowed to touch the ground for fear of their meat becoming less tender.
A small plate of jamón ibérico will set you back about 20 Euros or more than 30 dollars U.S. but it is worth every Euro cent.
The olives here are tasty as well but they aren’t nearly as funny to write about.
On the subject of meat, for the domainers who are reading this, it’s interesting to note that cubesteak.com does over 1 dollar a day for me on AdSense. That name shouldn’t do so well. Clearly it is because the name has a mini-site on it and isn’t parked. If you’d like me to help you put mini-sites up on your names and you are willing to pay my team for their time, drop me a note with the names you’d like done and we’ll get back to you.
Voyage of the Eclipse
June 30, 2008 by Rick Latona · 10 Comments
Having now returned from the Galapagos I realize I could have done the trip much more cheaply. It isn’t the kind of trip that needs business class seats and top accommodations. It was after all, an eco-tour.
Nevertheless, it was nice to start the journey in Quito at the Patio Andaluz. The former convent has been lovingly transformed into a first class hotel.
I won’t dwell much on my stay there as there is too much to cover about the islands and it’ll be hard enough to keep your attention. Two things about the city are worth mentioning. At an altitude of around 9000 feet or 3000 meters the city enjoys eternal fall weather. It was cool yet sunny during the day and chilly at night which is perfect for a guy like me that has too much insulation covering his bones.
The other item worth pointing out about Quito is the large collection of colonial Spanish architecture. I’m told that there are more buildings from the 1600s, built by Spain, than there are in Bogota but I have yet to go there and verify this fact. It’s a very nice city to stroll around in.
Before leaving we took a quick drive to the equator, or what they told us was the equator. I’m sure I’ve passed the imaginary line a hundred times in my travels but it was kind of cool to think you were standing on it.
One of the things which may or may not be true about the equator is that you are lighter when standing on the center of the earth. Well, as you can see in this picture this is either a fact or my eight year-old is going to have a future in women’s basketball.
Being in the globalization business, I couldn’t help but to ask our tour guide what the minimum wage in Ecuador was. His answer of $250 per month didn’t surprise me. What did was his added response that the president is trying to install a $4000 per month maximum wage. That’s such a socialist policy that it borderlines communism. Apparently, the president of Ecuador is good friends with the leader of Venezuela which explains a lot. I couldn’t help but think of a quote I had just read in The Voyage of the Beagle which was written all the way back in the 1830s.
Charles Darwin – “And when the old bloody-minded tyrant is gone to his long account, Paraguay will be torn by revolutions, violent in proportion to the previous unnatural calm. That country will have to learn, like every other South American state that a republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principals of justice and honour.”
I’ve enjoyed reading his journals. Some good parts are when he says something which must have been quite normal in the 1830s but seem rather ludicrous now.
Charles Darwin – “The second day after our return to the anchorage, a party of officers and myself went to ransack an old Indian grave, which I had found on the summit of a neighbouring hill. “
The best part of the entire book was, of course, where we can witness the birth of the theory of evolution. Years before he wrote his On the Origin of Species he writes about the Galapagos on page 400 of the copy I have, what you see in the paragraph below. It’s a bit long for a quote but worth reading.
Charles Darwin – “The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe t
hat within a period geologically recent the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”
What everyone realizes when they set foot on the first island is that you can get incredibly close to the animals, reptiles and birds. You could literally poke them if your guide would let you. That’s really the best part. You are part of the eco-system while there. I swam with sea lions, sea turtles and penguins. How cool is that?
You can sit there pondering all sorts of crazy thoughts. You’ve heard that the dinasours were both reptiles and birds, right? Why is it that all the endemic life on the Galapagos Islands are also reptiles and birds of all sorts? It seams to me to be a view of what the earth was once like. Recently cooled mounds of lava with reptiles and birds everywhere, etc… Anyway, you don’t think 
thoughts like that when you are sitting behind a computer launching websites.
The entire trip was really an incredible learning experience. I hope my kids can retain even a portion of it. Hell, I hope I can retain a portion of it. Before I left I thought blue footed boobies were something you saw on the French riviera. Well, maybe the Spanish riviera. I don’t think the Frenchies would wear Crocks.
Another thing you learn is that the world is a dangerous place. It’s an eat or be eaten world. You hear these stories about birds that have two eggs and the stronger of the chicks pushes the weaker one out off the cliff onto the rocks to die so he doesn’t have to compete over the food his mother is bringing. Or you watch baby sea lions starving to death on the beach because their mothers abandoned them and the guides do nothing 
about it because they can’t alter the eco-system. The humanity in you says, “well feed the damn thing” but you know they are right so you just shake you head and move along.
The birds in this picture have blue feet. I just thought that I’d point that out.
Would I recommend this trip? You bet I would. Take your mate, your kids or both. Learn to dive first if you don’t know how because the best stuff is all under the water.
