Technology PR:
Berlin, Germany May 20, 2008 -- dotMP today announces from the International Trademark Association (INTA) annual meeting that this summer it will provide ".mp" domains and robust domain-centric identity management services to all individuals online--free of charge. To help trademark owners protect their intellectual property, dotMP also announces it is initiating a Sunrise period at http://get.mp to provide ample time (May 15 - August 31) for trademark owners to protect their marks prior to the entire top-level domain being opened to the general public.
The decision by Google, Yahoo and AOL to adopt OpenID, a system of federating and authenticating between domains, has caused a radical shakeup in the social network market. Social networks are moving from networks within a domain where a user has a profile to a network between domains where the user hosts their own site and connects with other users' sites in an open social network. This significant change in the social networking space, combined with personal users ability to get a .mp domain for free from September 1st will dramatically change the domain market and open it to hundreds of millions of new entrants. The potential for these users to secure and create a domain that infringes a trademark is higher than it has ever been.
dotMP Chairman, Gib Bintliff, on site at the International Trademark Association (INTA) annual meeting in Berlin May 17-21 to guide the IP community through the Sunrise process as well as to brief trademark owners on the changes in the online space said, "there is a perfect storm brewing wherein all the barriers to entry for domain ownership will soon be removed and a land rush comparable to that of .com in the early 1990s is imminent. The 80 million .com domains registrations are now dwarfed by the 300 million personal profiles within the top seven social networks alone. The potential for this level of ubiquity and familiarity with .mp as the domain for personal identity and social networking, combined with the ease with which individuals can register and create potentially infringing sites means that trademark owners would be well-advised act on the Sunrise opportunity."
The first service to be launched will be Chi.mp -- the Internet's "Content Hub and Identity Management Platform"-- that will allow any user who signs up for a .mp domain to simply and easily create a networked domain without any technical skills whatsoever. Visit http://chi.mp for more information.
Chi.mp Chief Strategy Officer Tony Haile, speaking from the Data Sharing Summit in Silicon Valley last week, said, "the cost of domains represented the last barrier to an open social network on the web. Now that .mp domains are being given to personal users for free, we expect to see at least seven- to ten million social network users move to this space in the first two years alone. This may well be the biggest change to the domain market since its inception."
About dotMP
dotMP is the registry of Saipan DataCom (SDC), a privately-held, caused-based for-profit technology firm headquartered in Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (U.S.) with offices in Honolulu, San Francisco and New York City. SDC is the exclusive registrar and registry for the .mp ccTLD of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Find the registry at http://get.mp
