Just saw a post about blacknight.ie offering .EU domain names at 5 euros per. Unless I am mistaken, that is at cost.
 This is noteworthy, as we certainly watch pricing trategy like this suceed in the US, so it will be good to see how such a pricing model will drive organic growth and adoption of the .EU namespace.
Hi-
I am jazzed!Â
Joe Higgins, who many in the industry know from DomainFest, TRAFFIC, GeoDomainExpo, or Domain Roundtable conferences, is a friend and co-worker. The exciting news today is that his band “The Likes of You” made the list of ten finalist bands that will participate in a contest of elimination similar to the American Idol show.
I encourage readers of my blog to watch this show, and if you enjoy “The Likes of You”, spread awareness and vote for them.
http://tv.msn.com/tv/pics/band2?photoidx=4
www.myspace.com/likesofyou is their MySpace page.
Good Luck, Joe, and rock the stage!
-JÂ
 auDA is releasing a list of reserved geographical names on October 21st.
According to the 2005 ballot, the names registered in the first 5 days will cost $825 (AU$ inc. GST) plus registrar’s registration fee. After the 5 day period, names will be charged $21.45 (AU$ inc. GST) plus the registrar’s registration fee.
ICANN is establishing a forum on allocation methods for single character ([A-Z0-9]) second level registrations in the gTLDs.
There are 16 gTLDs that have single character registrations restricted, of which .COM, .NET, and .ORG have only six registrations within that predated the rule to establish the restriction (q.com – Qwest, x.com – Paypal, z.com – Nissan, i.net – Oxide, q.net – Q Networks, and x.org – X Windows open source).
 The net result of the current process could allow for a thundering herd of registrants clamoring for these domain registrations, or there could be an auction process introduced to accomodate the process, should there be a change from the status quo.
Please welcome North Korea (aka Korea, Democratic People’s Republic) (.KP), Montenegro (.ME), and Serbia (.RS) to the root zone.
Delegation was approved at the recent Special ICANN Board of Director meeting on September 11.
My compliments to Kim Davies and David Conrad at IANA on a smooth process from board approval to root addition.
It appears that the zones were added to the root, but the IANA whois does not yet list the administrative entities for these published yet.
.KP was delegated to “Korea Computer Center”.
.RS and .ME are going to be replacements for the former .YU namespace (formerly Yugoslavia – and YU left the ISO3166-1 list), with a 2-3 year responsible transition of that namespace as .YU is sunsetted. .RS is to be operated by the same adminstrator of the .YU ccTLD.
