Domain Magnate

Dot Asia released a press release about their successful auction

.Asia Auctions Fetches Over US$3 Million

.Asia Hot-or-Not Contest First Weekly Prize Winning Domain: resorts.asia
GMA2008.Asia Attracts Millions of Hits, Drives .Asia Adoption

Hong Kong, 16 June 2008 – DotAsia Organisation announced today total registration for .Asia
domains are expected to exceed a quarter of a million by the end of the first quarter after its public
launch . Proceeds from the .Asia Sunrise and Landrush auctions have already exceeded US$3M
and rising, demonstrating strong demand and growth value for .Asia domains. read more »

DomainPulse reports:

China (.cn) has overtaken Germany (.de) to become the world’s largest country code for domain names. With an average of around 400,000 to 500,000 .cn domain names registered each month it would be safe to assume there are more than 12,300,000 names registered compared to 12,098,279 .de names registered at the time of writing.

The two ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are much larger than any of their competitors with the next ccTLD being .uk (United Kingdom) with 6,880,775 and close to three million .nl (Netherlands) domain names.

Of all TLDs, ccTLDs and gTLDs, only .com is larger than .cn and .de, followed by .net, while .org and .uk are roughly equal in fifth position.

The success of Germany’s country code has been due to few restrictions on the eligibility of registrants for .de domain names and a low price. Although France has a similar population, there are currently only 1,153,637 registrations.

These extraordinary registration rates are a result of extremely low reg fees in .cn domains. Regular domainers from all over the world can buy .cn domains for just $0.13 at a variety of sites. A predeposit is usually required.

Bigger resellers can get the domains for even cheaper paying just pennies on the dollar.

My guess is once the reg fees rise there registration counts for .cn will fall dramatically, unless we start seeing some high sales to support the tld growth

WHOIS: Protecting the Privacy of Domain Name Holders

CIRA is implementing changes to the dot-ca WHOIS search tool, effective June 10, 2008.

WHOIS is a common Internet search tool used to look up the contact information of domain name holders (Registrants). A search returns information such as name, address, phone and fax numbers, and email address. While WHOIS has been used since the inception of the Internet, recent concerns over privacy necessitated a re-evaluation of what information is publicly available in the dot-ca (.ca) WHOIS.

In January 2004, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) took effect in Canada. This Federal law provides guidelines for the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information by private organizations. Under this act, the situations where an organization can disclose an individual’s personal information are strictly limited and require consent. read more »

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) today launches its campaign to celebrate the registration of one million dot-ca domain names with the unveiling of a campaign website at onemilliondomains.ca. CIRA expects to reach the one million milestone in early April 2008 after passing 750,000 registrations just 18 months prior in October 2006. The campaign showcases the growth of dot-ca domain names, dot-ca websites and the Canadians behind them. read more »