Crossing the International Borders with a Website Domain
With the advent of the internet, we are truly becoming one-world but before you decide to expand into the international cyberspace, there are some things you should be aware of. Find out what you need to know as you listen to this part of our interview with Monte Cahn of Moniker.com.
Cindy: Hello, you’re listening to the E-Marketing Talk Show. Today we’re talking with Monte Cahn from Moniker and in Segment 2, we’ll be crossing International borders talking about domain names, so stay tuned, we’ll be right back.
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Todd: Welcome back to E-Marketing Talk Show. I’m Todd Serouhan, here with Cindy Turrietta and we’re talking with Monte Cahn from Moniker.com. And, we’re going to actually talk a little bit about International . . . crossing the International borders with website domains, and Moniker.com actually lets you register some International domains and I think that he said about 70 of them, is that right, Monte?
Monte: Ah, 54, actually . . .
Todd: 54.
Monte: . . . International country code extensions.
Todd: Okay, cool.
Monte: Ah, the top 54 extensions that are available, yes.
Cindy: Gotcha. And real quick, before we get into the International, we sort of ended with you could get your domains with .US or .BIZ or .INFO and one of the problems that I’ve run into with clients doing that is they always change their mind six months to a year later because they realize nobody ever remembers if their domains end in .INFO or .BIZ and they end up finding something in .COM that they can use. Do you find that as well, Monte?
Monte: Well, the .INFO and .BIZ and some of the other extensions aren’t obviously the natural type in reaction for a customer or somebody out on the Web. I don’t know if anybody knows this out there, but a few years ago (actually about 4 – 3 years ago) Webside Story did a study and a survey about how many times people type in a domain name into the browser versus going through search engine and 47% said they went into the browser and directly typed in a domain name to get to their end destination.
Cindy: Wow.
Monte: That actually has increased, not decreased, even with the presence of Google and Yahoo! and its popularity, to almost 70% today. So what happens is, people naturally go to their domain names by typing it in. And that includes going to eBay.com, Amazon.com and other top places to go, so it does make sense when you think of it that way. But it also means that people that are going to your local grocery or your local car dealership are also typing those names in and sometimes there’s misspells, sometimes they’re not getting to their absolute destination. So the natural reaction, for the United States anyway, is a .Com address at the end. .INFO and .BIZ and some of the other gTLDs, which are not International-based, have done a pretty good job of being the second and third alternatives for those extensions, now that .Com’s been kind of eaten up and again, as I mentioned before, there’s opportunity to buy domain names that are in your brand and identity in the aftermarket now, just like buying pieces of property and they have a little bit of a premium to them, some of them have big premiums to them, but if you really want to direct customers to where you want to go, .Com is still kind of the king and then all the other extensions you want to use as protection.
Cindy: Exactly. And .Com when it comes to email addresses, is huge, you know, so that, I just highly encourage people always to get .Com . . .
Monte: If they can.
Cindy: If they can. If there’s any way possible.
Todd: Oh, yeah, for sure. I would definitely agree with that. But you know we found actually some shows dealing with the Hispanic market and other International markets and this kind of gets into the International domains. But if you’re representing a website in another country, you definitely want to get the domain for that country, the extension for that country, I should say. And do all countries have their own extensions?
Monte: Not every country has their own extension yet. I think there’s . . . I forget what the last count of actual countries there are in the entire world. I think it’s around 300 or 400 or somewhere between 300 and 400, but there are 243 country codes, currently.
Todd: Okay.
Monte: In order to have a country code assigned to your domain name, you need a registry and you need an infrastructure and there’s lots of networking and all kinds of hardware and software and a stable network in that particular country to support that kind of extension. So that’s why there’s 243 country codes and not all 500. Obviously, there’s some less fortunate countries, countries that don’t have the monetary or the technical resources to stabilize and create their own extensions. However, your first point was very correct. And that is people in Europe; people even in Canada don’t necessarily tend to type in .Com as their first reaction. They type in where they want to go in their particular country code extension. And so if you’re doing business in Hispanic or Latin America or in Europe and Germany – matter of fact, Germany’s extension, .DE, is the second most registered domain extension in the entire world. Uhm, .Co.UK is actually third. And then we got to .NET and .ORG and then .INFO and then a couple other country codes. So that gives you an idea of how powerful country codes are for usage in this particular locality.
Todd: So, is there any rhyme or reason to how they’re named? Like, I’ll give you an example: the ideal of Costa Rica a lot, so the extension for them is .Co.CR; well, Mexico is .Com.MX, so there’s a com in there and Nicaragua, which is just neighboring Costa Rica is .Com.NI and its funny how Costa Rica is .Co, not .Com. So is it . . . how does that get determined?
Monte: Well, initially, when country codes first came out, they used the piggy-back onto a .Com because people were used to the .Com extension first . . .
Todd: Uh-huh.
Monte: . . . because it was the only extension out there besides .Net and .Org, which had death-defying usage.
Todd: Sure.
Monte: I should maybe go back a little bit: .Com was designed originally for the use of Internet commerce, for doing business for profit. Uhm, .Net was designed for networking or networks of companies or individuals. And then Org, .Org was designed for Organizations, non-profits. The good news that it never panned out that way, where you couldn’t use a domain name in those ways, specifically; and now you can use .Org and .Net names in anyway that you want.
Todd: .Gov obviously is exclusive for the government.
Monte: Right. And those particular countries in respect to the country codes used the piggy-back off of the .Com ‘cause it was the most popular extension at the time and then added their extension at the end. Now a lot of those are going direct, so for example, China used to be .Com.CN; now it’s .CN and had the primary and secondary location of their extension.
Todd: So they got to kind of choose.
Monte: Well, after they become established and have their own infrastructure, yes.
Todd: Okay, okay.
Cindy: Gotcha.
Monte: They go to a little place called IANNA and they establish that identity and then everything can get switched and their old extension will work as well.
Todd: Okay. Well, I have a . . . this is kind of interesting because I’ve actually gone through this process but what challenges are there to actually registering a domain name that’s from another country – say one of the 54 that you can’t register at least with Moniker? Or, say, you couldn’t register with any registration company but you have to go directly to that country to register.
Monte: Right. Well, many countries require presence in that particular country. So, for example, .Co.Uk, does not requrei presence in that country. You can be in the United States and register a .Co.Uk, which is Great Britain, you know, England.
Cindy: Now, when you say a presence, you mean like a business presence?
Monte: A business presence or an address; some kind of identity presence that says that you are entitled to have a domain name from that country or you operate out of that country in some way.
Cindy: Gotcha.
Monte: Canada is one of the most stringent countries, believe it or not, that you have to have a presence and they check that, CIRCO, which is the Canadian registry checks that presence and you have to have an established business address of some sort or be a Canadian citizen in order to operate in a .CA extension. So does Germany.
Todd: Interesting.
Monte: And lots of other countries, for example. Moniker enables a lot of those country codes we actually have established presence in a lot of those countries so that we enable our customers to establish their identities and their brands in those particular country codes.
Todd: So, can you register a Canada domain through Moniker?
Monte: Through Moniker we can not register Canadian domain names yet but in about 3 months we will be, because we are establishing a Canadian presence.
Todd: Okay. But the people who actually register the Canadian domain, do they have to be in Canada then?
Monte: Yes. They have to be in Canada or have a Canadian corporation. They can be living in the United States but they would have dual citizenship or have some reason to have . . . [inaudible]
Cindy: A patch
Todd: Interesting. For Costa Rica, you know, I registered GoVisitCostaRica.Co.CR, the Costa Rican domain and you don’t, fortunately, you don’t have to have a presence . . .
Monte: Right.
Todd: . . . in the country but there are a lot of . . . it’s funny, just trying to register and I finally registered in and it’s like, do you trust it, you know, ‘cause credit cards aren’t a . . . people don’t put a lot of credit cards online in Latin America and I thought, well, what the hell, I’ll try it. And it’s funny, to resolve the domain name, took about a month.
Monte: Okay, in most of the countries, believe it or not, even in England, in the .Co.Uk, it’s a manual paper process. It’s not automated like it is here. So that’s what you deal with. You establish the identity, they check in the database, and then it’s a paper trail. They push paper all around; you receive paper confirmation that you have your domain name registered in that extension and then you’re able to go. So, we can help a lot of people out in establishing those identities and giving them the rules and regulations with, you know, when that happens. And there’s a lot of other registrars that offer that.
Cindy: Very cool. Well, we need to take another quick break but that will lead us into Segment 3 on buying and selling domain names. So don’t go away, we’ll be right back.
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