According to Richard Tindal, vice-president of strategic partnerships and relationships at NeuLevel, Australians have already registered around 40,000 dot-biz addresses, placing the country sixth in the world in terms of take-up, despite its relative size in the global economy. While other country's figures are boosted by multiple applications from single companies, Australia has the third largest group of unique businesses registered, a result that Tindal attributes to the high level of SME's in this country.
In fact Tindal believes the majority of applications for a dot-biz name worldwide come from SME's.
-Large multinationals already have brand recognition, so people can easily find them on the Web," said Tindal. -Smaller companies are finding that people can't find them on the Net."
Tindal also pointed out companies are attracted to the exclusivity of the new gTLD.
-If you take 100 dot-coms at random, you'll probably find only 10 are commercial sites. The rest are personal pages, speculators, and so on," says Tindal. -The new dot-biz domain will be purely for business."
NeuLevel plans to maintain the integrity of the registrations by requiring applicants to provide information regarding the nature of their business. Tindal specifically noted that buying domain names in the hope of selling them later is not considered a business purpose.
Businesses signing up for a dot-biz domain, also have access to a range of value added services which Tindal says was instrumental in winning the tender from ICANN. These include a directory service listing all supplied information about the company.
-Businesses don't just want a Web site, they want to be found," Tindal said. -We do not intend to retail this information, however we will be providing it to search engines so they can provide it to their audience."
Apart from the directory services, NeuLevel has been careful to prepare for the intellectual property debates surrounding the dot-com registrations. The NeuLevel registry allows applicants to contact parties who have already reserved a gTLD, and find out on what basis they believe they deserve access to that name.
Tindal explained that much of the initial phase, or -land rush", was focussed on dealing with conflicting intellectual property claims.
As applicants are provided with the rationale behind competing company's claims to a dot-biz domain, they are well positioned to decide whether they want to proceed with the their own claim to the name, Tindal said. They then have the opportunity to submit a claim on the name, change their claim to a different name, or drop the claim altogether.
After this process, any multiple claims go into a pool and then one applicant is randomly selected.
-This is an open, clear, fair and defensible process," says Tindal, adding -we think it will become the standard way of dealing with this problem."
After November 7, it will be first in, first-served, and any competing claims will have to go through the Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP) run by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). This involves selecting one of four arbitration panels, which will hear both sides of the case and make a legal administrative judgement. This process is inexpensive and only takes thirty days to reach a resolution, Tindal said.
