Posts Tagged “internet”

You may have heard about ICANN — the internet’s governing body — approving a plan to allow an almost infinite amount of TLDs on top of the handful that already existed. They are hailing this as opening up new opportunities for non-English language internet users and businesses but I belong to the camp of dissenters that believe a majority of the possible TLDS will be too underpopulated to make their registration worthwhile. and cause confusion among non-tech people who have become accustomed to .com/.net/.org. Josh beat me to bringing up the possibility of a .anime TLD and the costs involved in establishing one – $100,000 to $500,000 according to Ars Technica.

The potential uses for a .anime and a .manga TLD seem initially beneficial with each series potentially able to have their own domain name, e.g. shaman-king.anime, berserk.manga, and give each an information space regarding its status in Japan, Europe, America, and other places. Digital downloads could also be served from each show’s individual page. The caveat, however, is who would be willing to front the funds to establish the TLD and manage registrations and who SHOULD be in charge of them. They could be handled by a consortium of publishers with a board of directors but there has to be some rules established to prevent any potential “bad blood” stir-ups or selfish business interests from disrupting any registration attempts.

Many would hope that whoever does step up and found such a TLD will allow for public registration but there will have be restrictions on what could be registered by non-copyright holders since most, if not all, publishers would want to protect their trademarks and brands from gaining a poor reputation from an amateurishly designed fansite. I doubt a slew of people would want their own .anime domain if they have an existing domain that serves them well but there may be a market of interested takers.

According to a post made yesterday on TorrentFreak, anime fans who use BitTorrent sport the highest share [seed/leech] ratio (2.5) over other more popular categories like TV shows (1.87) and applications (1.53). However, anime only made up 5.4% of traffic whereas “TV shows” was the most popular category at just under half the total traffic, 49.68%. Also, something interesting to note is that only 10% of torrents offered are TV related; anime torrents make up 4.3% of all listings.

The stats given in the post were based on a sample of over 400,000 .torrent files from public BT sites. Supposedly these numbers will be reported monthly so it’ll be interesting to see how they change in the future. Personally, I’ve started to use IRC more than BitTorrent to get my fansubs especially if the series is more than a couple years old and there are only a couple seeders.