New domains,... opportunities or problems?
ICANN, the organisation that overseas the domain name system, has come up with a proposal to expand the number of domains available, but does it solve the problem, or does it just create even more headaches for website owners?
Anyone trying to buy a domain these days knows that almost any decent name you can think of has already been snapped up and new websites end up with more and more contrived spellings and hyphenations to find an available domain name. By no means are all these domain names being used to host websites or email. A great many of them were registered by opportunists whose only interest in the name is in selling it later at a vastly inflated price.
ICANN has said it will address this problem by introducing a new scheme to increase the number of top level domains (TLDs) available. The TLD is the last word n the domain name, such as com, net or org. Previously, introducing a new TLD such as the "info" endings or the "eu" endings has been a long drawn out affair involving consultations and approval committees. ICANN has said that from mid 2009, anyone will be able to buy a franchise for a new generic TLD using any word they wish, for a fee of around £50,000.
This means that large organisations such as IBM for example could buy the "ibm" TLD and use any number of words in front of it, such as www.sales.ibm for example or www.officesystems.ibm. However, whilst the likes of IBM can afford to pay upwards of £50,000 for their own TLD, it is hard to see why they would want to. They already own the well-established ibm.com domain name. They don't need a whole new set of possibly-confusing domain names.
More likely is that we will see entrepreneurs wanting to set up generic TLDs such as "website" with a view to selling domain names in bulk on an unregulated first-come first-served basis in just the same way that people sell com, org and net domain names today. That may sound like it increases the names available, but in reality it just increases the cost burden to companies needing to protect their trademarks. Most companies already have to register four or five variants on their domain name to try to protect it from competitors. Adding new generic top level domains like website, company or corp just adds to that burden. It is unlikely to make it any easier for new websites to find the name they want to use, but more likely to make some generic TLD entrepreneurs very rich.
The domain name system has become a key component of the internet and decisions like this really deserve a lot more consideration than appears to have gone into this proposal.
18th July 2008
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.