Rick Latona is a man I truly respect. One, for being light years ahead in his thinking of monetizing domains and two, for having the confidence to be a more high risk, high reward than his peers. He, like others preach the generic domain because it is GENERIC. Nobody owns the rights to generics and therefore are kings of the dot com world. People take these generics and build a brand based on these names and on some occassions , actually take a generic name, add a dot com to the end, and now they have a brand. Take buy.com. Buy is a big generic but we all know Buy.com. Now bring in the leeches. Those who don’t have the cash, intelligence, or ability to develop a brand. They simply come in and buy typos or other tlds to try and capatilize on the traffic that others have built.
Rick Latona doesn’t need that kind of traffic, he can make enough money building and branding but yet he is selling names with the .CM, most of which are a trademark nightmare. I know he is selling them because he can make money on them but I do believe he doesn’t want them in his portfolio. I just feel it shouldn’t even be promoted. Here is the list. Companies like Billboard and Buy have worked hard to build online brands and now that are being held hostage for a few thousand to keep traffic from being taken away because the user accidentally forgot an “o”. This isn’t to say that a generic .net or .org could not be its own entity but there is not doubt in my mind the .cm was only made to capatilize on “fat fingers” .
Now I am no saint, I have owned a few names that contain other trademarked names in the domain. I have owned MacGoogle for a while. I don’t park it or monetize but that still keeps me a hippocrite. I think we all agree the cybersquatters are what continue to shed a bad light on domainers. They are the reason new laws are continued to be written and ruled in the favor of the big companies. They are continuously trying to help the big boys that pay big taxes and protect them from the guys that squat and put $50 in their paypal account from parking.
In summary, I just hate seing one of the leaders in our industry be a part of this and promote it. Kevin Ham came up with the idea and was only applauded because he pulled it off. To take it further and start selling names off should not.
So what should Cameroon do ? Not allow people to register domains ? What will happen with .om and .co, .et , .ne should they be taken offline before they come online ? Who is to decide?
All of the big domainers have had or still have typo domains in their portfolio, like wwwgeneric.com, so this is acceptable but a legit ccTLD isn’t ?
Sure they should have their own but how about not making it an obvious typo like cmr or roo. These countries are not trying to get their own citizens to register and to think so is naive. And to answer your question, no this isn’t legit. A few typos is acceptable, a business based on typos isnt.
Cameroon’s country code, like every other country was determined by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority: which manages the root zone file http://www.iana.org
All country codes have to be 2 letters, and cannot be three.
It was not like Cameroon went out and asked to be .cm it was just assigned that way
well, the ccTLDs were handed out a long time ago, so I don’t think it would be right to make them change becuase .com become so popular.