IANA Stewardship Breakthrough and other matters

It was good news last week when ICANN announced an important milestone towards the IANA Stewardship Transition. On March 14, 2014, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) asked ICANN to convene the global Internet community to develop proposals to transition the stewardship of the IANA functions to the multi-stakeholder community. It also called for enhancements to ICANN’s accountability mechanisms. The Names, Numbers and Protocols Community went to work, fashioning out an acceptable proposal to The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)

Now, NTIA has released a comprehensive evaluation of the proposals. It is pleasant to note that NTIA accepted that the community-developed proposals met its stringent criteria. It is an important recognition of the entire community and its tireless work to reach this important milestone. Nigeria and Nigerians participated actively by making important contributions towards the IANA Stewardship Transition. By these contributions, we are safeguarding the interest of the future generation of Nigerians, and ensuring that Nigeria’s voice is heard globally.

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What to do with Extra / Unused Domain Names from the gTLDs
With the recent opening up of new gTLDs by the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and having reached a milestone of 1000 new gTLDs, it is obvious that individuals, companies and corporations would be left  with no option than to have more than one domain name; all in an attempt to protect their names, brands or trademarks.
Sometimes these extra/unused domain names may have been bought for a project that was never launched or they were previously used and are no longer needed.
If you own extra domain names but you are not in the business of domain investing, it will be good to consider one of these three options; namely to either use the domain names, make money from the traffic their domain names receive or to increase the likelihood of selling their domain names.

Three ways to profit from unused domain names:
1) You can redirect traffic to a related website owned by the person or company. This is the best option for a company that has rebranded or a domain name that was previously used by the company. A domain sale is probably less important than lost or confused customers and pay per click (PPC) revenue will probably be less than sales or referrals.
There is no reason a domain name should resolve to the domain registrar’s default landing pages when there are some good options for the domain name.
2) You can park the domain names to earn pay per click (PPC) revenue. It is free to sign up for a parking service provided by some US companies, and these companies accept customers who have domain names with traffic, even if the registrant does not own a large portfolio of domain names. If the domain names are for sale, the owner can add a banner to the parked page to let visitors know it is for sale. This allows for people to earn money and potentially sell their unused domain names.
3) You can create or use a domain for sale landing page. Making the landing page clear that the domain name is for sale can help generate leads to expedite a sale. There are ready-made domains for sale landing pages that people can buy or the domain owner can have a custom landing page created by a designer/developer. The only issue with this is that the domain owner will need to pay for a hosting account or use a web hosting service.
In addition to the points enumerated above, it is always good to use a domain name based on the geographical location such as the .ng. These always rank above generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) on the search engine and it comes with other advantages for business owners.

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