Changing Markets for Domain Names: Technical, Economic, and Policy Challenges
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The Domain Name System (DNS) is critical infrastructure for the Internet. The growth in size and complexity of the DNS, together with changes in its governance and operational practices, have raised numerous challenges. Herein, we provide a qualitative and empirical overview of DNS ecosystem economics and the relationships among key participants, including ICANN, the registries, registrars, and registrants.
With this as background, the paper examines three key issues:
(1) market power;
(2) trends impacting the importance of domain names; and
(3) concerns over DNS abuse and security.
Read more (ssrn) / PDF Attached
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Forbes article:
MIT Researchers Estimate The Value Of Domain Name System (DNS) At $8 Billion
Since 1985, the Domain Name System (DNS) has played a critical but underappreciated role to map names to internet addresses. Domain names have important value as intellectual property and marketing assets in addition to their ability to “route the money of the Internet.” The market value of global DNS ecosystem is roughly $8 billion annually, with additional value for domain names.
... In the last 10 years, the number of generic Top Level Domains (TLDs) has expanded significantly from a handful of suffixes .com for commercial, .org for organization, .edu for education, .gov for US government, and .mil for US military to nearly 1200, which, including country code TLDs (.EU etc) numbers about 1500. This evolution has given firms more flexibility beyond .com to register their online business addresses and may even offer additional marketing value with suffixes like .baby, .cafe, and so on.
Read more (Forbes)
Read more (ssrn) / PDF Attached
The Domain Name System (DNS) is critical infrastructure for the Internet. The growth in size and complexity of the DNS, together with changes in its governance and operational practices, have raised numerous challenges. Herein, we provide a qualitative and empirical overview of DNS ecosystem economics and the relationships among key participants, including ICANN, the registries, registrars, and registrants.
With this as background, the paper examines three key issues:
(1) market power;
(2) trends impacting the importance of domain names; and
(3) concerns over DNS abuse and security.
Read more (ssrn) / PDF Attached
----------
Forbes article:
MIT Researchers Estimate The Value Of Domain Name System (DNS) At $8 Billion
Since 1985, the Domain Name System (DNS) has played a critical but underappreciated role to map names to internet addresses. Domain names have important value as intellectual property and marketing assets in addition to their ability to “route the money of the Internet.” The market value of global DNS ecosystem is roughly $8 billion annually, with additional value for domain names.
... In the last 10 years, the number of generic Top Level Domains (TLDs) has expanded significantly from a handful of suffixes .com for commercial, .org for organization, .edu for education, .gov for US government, and .mil for US military to nearly 1200, which, including country code TLDs (.EU etc) numbers about 1500. This evolution has given firms more flexibility beyond .com to register their online business addresses and may even offer additional marketing value with suffixes like .baby, .cafe, and so on.
Read more (Forbes)
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