IDN Movers and Shakers: Pricey Dot Healthy IDN is Building the Trusted Platform for All Things Healthy

At The Domain Conference a few weeks ago I had the chance to catch-up with Johnny Du, one of the minds behind a new IDN that is already getting attention from companies like Google and Microsoft. The new IDN is currently in sunrise but will go into general availability at the end of this month.

dot-healthy-idn-logo
“We want Internet users to know that if they are looking for trustworthy healthy products and services, .健康 (.healthy in Chinese) is a domain extension that has gone the distance to assure that for them. We require all our users can back up the claims that they make.For example,if a drug company claims its product can cure a cancer on its website which uses .健康 as its domain name, they must have a certificate issued by FDA or its counterparts in foreign country to support their saying.” (Source – Johnny Du, Stable Tone)

This addresses a growing concern on the Internet given how easy it is for companies to put up a website and claim to be “healthy” or “organic” without having to give any real data or proof behind their claims.

“Our registration is open to any individual or company who wants to use the domain name to promote healthy product, service and lifetyle. However, we will strictly enforce our usage policy. We will use both human and sofware to actively monitor alldomain names utilization. Any abuse, misleading, spaming,etc content and behaviour will lead to suspension,termination and transfering of the domain name. The goal is to develop a safe, trusted and healthy cyber space in Chinese, Korean, Japanese market around the world (which covers 1.5billion people)”  (Source – Johnny Du, Stable Tone)

I had the chance to sit down and have a beer with Johnny in Florida and can tell you he is incredibly passionate about what he is doing. We’ve all seen websites promising food, supplements, or other health-related products that make broad claims about what they do and how they do it, but this is never verified by anyone. The team over at dot healthy IDN is taking on this responsibility and making sure that brands on their domain extension are indeed doing something that is actually healthy.

One fun fact I learned while talking with Johnny is that the characters for the .healthy IDN, which are 健康 have the same meaning in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

As I’ve said many times before, I think the success of a new domain extension has a lot to do with who uses the domain names, not just who owns them. A price tag of $3,000 means that these domains will most-likely only go to people with serious use cases for the names. It’s also incredibly unlikely for these names to be used for phishing or scam sites given the price tag and additional usage policy enforcement. With a clear focus on use the team at dot healthy is going above-and-beyond to make sure that when someone buys one of their domains, they’re doing it for the right reasons and plan to actively use the domain for something that consumers can trust.

Here’s a bit more information about the timeline for registering dot healthy IDNs:

Sunrise period: 9/22/2015 – 10/22/2015

Trademark Claim start: 10/27/2015 – 1/25/2016

General Availability start: 10/27/2015

You’ve heard of “Intel Inside” I look at this as “Healthy Inside” and given that huge companies like Google and Microsoft have already started to register domains in this IDN (I found microsoft.健康, google.健康, youtube.健康, blogger.健康,as well as Google’s new parent company alphabet.健康 on DomainTools) it looks like this message is resonating very well so far.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton