Gandi Bar

This was my first Nominet conference and to be honest I thought it would be quite a dry, corporate affair however I was in for a surprise!

Much like the Internet as a whole, governance of TLD's (top level domains) and ccTLD's(country specific) has grown organically and varies from country to country. To-date the UK and the US governments have taken a non-interventionist approach to governance. The US have taken a totally freemarket approach and gave the right to manage .com to Verisign who run the registry as a profitable and commercial business. Nominet run the .UK registry theoretically as a not for profit business however the fact they made £25 million profit this year has raised questions among it's membership and the government.

Some of you may have seen earlier in the year that ICANN (the body in charge of regulating the domain name space) announced that it was going to liberalise the market for domain name extensions, e.g. the bit that follows the last '.' in a name, .com, .net., .co.uk, .eu, etc.

What this means is that in theory anyone can apply to become a registry in their own right, and get .theirname so that you can buy domain names from them and get yourname.theirname. ICANN have now announced that the 'evaluation' process for new extensions will be costly, $185,000. Well costly for you and me, but perhaps not for funds or speculators.

But what is point in all this? Does it matter? Should we care?

The justification for doing it is that the internet is growing, more people are coming online, it allows more choice, blah, blah, blah. Which has some truth to it. But in some ways there is already an infinite number of domain names available across each of the roughly 280 existing TLDs (from .ac -> .zw - there should be a catchy alphabet song for them!).

But what does it mean for you, the customer? Well, it does mean you can get more choice. You will be able to buy yourdomain.something. Whether this helps is a different matter. Many of these new extensions will be quite specific, which may help, e.g. myplace.restaurant, or myhouse.london, but it may just create more and more confusion that your chosen name can have so many different extensions, which one is really you?

One result of this will probably be that more and more people will want to authenticate that their domain name, whatever unusual form it takes, can be explicitly linked to them. The most common way to do this at the moment it through SSL certificates, where a third party will guarantee that the domain is owned by a particular individual/company, and that you are browsing on that site in a secure way. So this is something to think about and watch out for...

There is one group of people that will undoubtedly benefit from this liberalisation and that is the spammers, advertisers and squatters.

In the old days if you wanted to protect your brand you could buy all 280 extensions. No longer. With a potentially limitless number of extensions, there is no way that you can get yourbrand.allofthem, so even the most well protected global brands may find a few more lawsuits on the horizon. The beneficiaries of this will be the squatters and advertisers who will use establishedbrand.newtld as an advertising site, or domain auction target (buy this one back, for $xxx).

And then there will be the increased volume of ad sites, just showing endless streams of ad feeds on domain names with no real purpose except to make money for their owner. I always think about this in terms of domain names as property: if the best properties in your town (domains on your tld) were closed down and became advertising bill boards, would you stand for this as a resident? This is exactly what is happening online. Most of the best names/words are turning into bill boards, and it will only continue unless there is a regulatory change to stop or limit it.

So there you have it, the change is coming, the benefits are unclear. But one thing that is clear is that unless ICANN take more of a role in setting and enforcing codes of content for domain ownership/usage, we may find as customers we are browsing in a larger and more polluted domain space.

What do you think?

It's been 2 weeks now since we launched www.gandi.co.uk and we thought you might like to know a little more about the UK office and what we get up to day to day.

Ah a good question. Who is this strange and wonderful French domain registrar and hosting provider, and why should I believe they are wonderful? What does it mean to believe in domain name ethics? Well to understand Gandi you have to go back to the very beginning...

We've made it!

For some it has been a four year labour of love, for others, less. In any case, an important step has just been taken by the team, of whom I am ever more proud: our Cloud Infrastructure is now operational. Yes, we are pleased to announce the grand opening of our Gandi Hosting service!

This wild dream is fuelled behind the scenes by the desire of a team to create something truly different, that will provide a unique combination of flexibility and transparency - two crucial elements often missing in the market. The desire to see people only consume what they really need, to provide them with the ability to migrate their resources from one location to another when needed, to move about freely...in short, everything that we dreamt about as customers ourselves.

The entire industry, all the players in this market, know very well that this technology will replace shared hosting, and possibly even dedicated hosting. The advantages for customers are too great to be ignored, which is why the traditional players, having down played this new type of hosting, are using buzzwords around virtualization in order to continue to sell to customers who are insufficiently informed.

It is our mission: to explain, again and again, why everyone needs flexible and dedicated resources, and those that accept this are turning to these solutions. Today we are talking about web hosting, but the infrastructure is really based on and can be used for "Cloud Computing". In other words, the rental of 'super computer' processing power which can be accessed from anywhere in the world for needs as diverse as 3D rendering, gigantic databases, etc...

To get back to hosting, our choice has been to offer a product with the following components:

- a technology that allows a degree of flexibility and security that is unrivalled among current web hosts/discounters,

- a price that is within reach of the largest number of people, maintaining one of the the core values of Gandi,

- a service that is worthy of being called such, or even more! Our mission is to serve you individually as best we possibly can, not to create an enormous mass of faceless customers.

I sincerely believe that, every day that has gone by and is yet to come, every effort is being made to meet our objectives, whether they are technical or personal.

Of course, the miracle solution, the one with the biggest pipes, the most massive machines etc.. that many players in the market are bragging about, does not exist. No technology will ever be flawless and we would not be providing you with an honest service if we made that claim.

But we do believe that:

Our role as a partner in your online presence (which is far more than simply hosting of your website), includes knowing that we need to help you see that you must use common sense in all situations, for example, the prominent mention in our hosting contract of the necessity to perform regular backups of your data.

We have months, or even years ahead of us to adapt our service to meet your needs, to perfect it so that it increasingly becomes one that cannot be ignored.

We are asking for the thing that is most important in our eyes, your confidence, to show you the way to go, not to hide from you all that we are doing, and to ensure that the service is as good as it can be. In our mind, this is achieved by proving the quality of our products to you.

When you entrust your online presence with us, we must be responsive if things go wrong (and this, even if I obviously do not want it to occur, does happen), be transparent with regards to what is taking place, and to do everything in our power to fix it, and of course to back this up with a commercial gesture.

All of this is clearly mentioned in our contract with you.

I do not know what you, our customers, will do with this service. Judging from the thousands of you that have joined us, even before the grand opening, it has already been a huge success, and one that all of us here wish to continue!

Despite the length of this entry, please allow me to warmly thank all the beta testers that have been with us these last nine months, without whom we would not have been able to make the right choices. I hope that by keeping the current rates for a few more months, and that the various rate schemes will encourage you to stay with us. As a side note, our American customers find that our offer is quite inexpensive for this type of service, compared to other offers of the same type.

As a conclusion, I just wanted, before totally delivering this service, to say to my team that they did a simply fabulous job, and that this can never be taken away from them. Simply put, we have suffered, but this is one of those things that can be remembered for ever with pride.Thanks to all that have contributed to this project!.

If I have been smiling in recent weeks - while I should have been more "stressed" due to the accumulated "delays" - it has been for this very reason: we are doing something long-term, and I am very proud of this, given all that we have achieved.

PS: The hardest part is just beginning, hang in there!

Stephan

How could we not offer the Indian extension .IN, when the name of our company closely resembles the name of a great man who inspired so much in so many ? Yes, I am talking about the Mahatma, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, father of the Indian nation.

Yes that's right, Gandi is coming to the UK! But wait you ask, haven't we always been here anyway? Well yes, you're right we have. It is true that Gandi already has thousands of UK customers, with tens of thousands of domains registered, and a sister company located in the UK (www.moonfruit.com), but we don't feel we've ever given the UK as much love and attention as it deserves. So like a friendly cousin that lives just across the Channel in France, we're packing our bags, saying 'au revoir' to mummy and daddy Gandi, and moving to London!

So what does this mean for you? It means a dedicated UK team based in London working to support our UK Gandi customers and promote our ethical domain and cutting edge hosting services to new faces far and wide. The UK Gandi team will be keen to get your feedback on what you like about Gandi and what you think we could do better. We'll be taking our popular Gandi supports policy to the UK which has the goal of helping businesses that share our vision for the internet to get started online (please contact us if you think you’d be a good UK candidate for Gandi supports).

And what is our vision for the internet you may well ask? We intend to continue Gandi’s tradition of challenging the status quo, sticking to what we believe are ethical business practices and codes of conduct and always providing high quality products and services.

And we speak English-English! None of this fancy French-English, or "where's the 'u' gone?" US-English. Just plain old "May I have a cup of tea?" English as the Queen intended (though we don't believe she's a Gandi customer. Yet.).

So there you have it, Gandi is coming the UK: the new arrival of an old friend, it's as if we've always been here...looking forward to catching up with you soon.