Interisle cashes in as fresh TLD hopefuls pay for more data
Fresh TLD applicants turn to Interisle for more data in effort to avoid more delays.
Interisle Consulting Group dropped a bombshell on fresh top level domain name applicants when it submitted its 197 page note to ICANN regarding name collisions and fresh top level domain names.
As a result of the note, regarding 20% of applied-for strings were grouped into an “uncalculated risk” pool, which means that they could face three to six months of delays as ICANN further studies their risk potential.
This has led a number of fresh TLD applicants to collect their own data to try to counter the notion that delegating their domains could cause harm to internet users.
One beneficiary: Interisle Consulting Group, which is making more money by performing follow on work for applicants who were shelved into the bad buckets.
Dot Club, the sole remaining applicant for .club, commissioned a note from Interisle to determine where .club traffic was coming from. Dot Club determined (pdf) that it can mitigate most of the risk by restricting the use of the top 50 most queried second level strings. By doing so, the firm believes it would qualify for the “low risk” qualification, which won’t face such lengthy delays.
A number of sizable applicants are pooling resources to collect similar data without Interisle’s help. For most of the smaller applicants, though, I suspect paying Interisle will end up being their most cost effective approach to try to avoid further delays.
