jmccormac - 7:59 am on Jan 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

New extensions will provide local businesses an alternative.

I've heard this before and I don't agree with it. The reason is not obvious though. People without ccTLD experience rarely notice how people in ccTLD dominant countries remember URLs. They don't remember the extension like .ie or .co.uk - they think of websites as if they are physical locations. They don't have to remember the extension because they strongly identify with the ccTLD extension as their own country. Now that may give the city and state new gTLDs an advantage but it does take time for a new TLD to become established.

This will decrease the demand for .com's bringing the price of 'premium' .com's down. Supposing there were no ccTLDs, the demand of .com would have been much higher.

Again, there are problems with this interpretation. The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s meant that there was a frenzy of everyone having to have their .com domain name. The ccTLDs were often badly run as university department extensions by people who had absolutely no understanding of the real world or business. This gave the .com TLD a massive start over some ccTLDs. However the years 2001 to 2004 were hard for .com and many of the dotcom domains dropped and were not reregistered.

The domain bubble of 2005-2009 inflated the prices of .com domains but this was not due to genuine demand. It was due to the artificial scarcity created by ICANN incompetence. ICANN's regulations were exploited by domain tasters who would register dropped domains for five days and test them with PPC advertising. If the domains made more than the registration fee (according to a simple formula), then they would be retained but most would be dropped without costing the registrar anything. This meant that the entire day's drop of some TLDs was being registered by domain tasters and the ordinary businesses and companies who wanted to register domains couldn't get many of the "premium" domains or indeed many city/state type domains that had dropped. ICANN was shamed into taking action on this problem but the real action was taken by the economy and by Google et al who had been providing monetisation services (PPC adverts). Google cut the PPC revenues. That immediately killed a lot of the smaller operators but as the domains were registered for a year at a time, the impact was only visible months later as some of these domains began to drop again. It was a very different situation to the DotCom bubble. The effects of the death of easy credit in 2008-2010 are just beginning to appear.

Global businesses will still be using .com or .net depending upon their budgets, as the city and/or state extensions are no good to them.

Most business is local. Global businesses tend to use .com more than .net TLD.

Dot us was just one player, now there will be a gang.

DotUS was an amazing opportunity that was badly handled by the US government. It really should have had a brand champion such as Godaddy and Bob Parsons to run it. Many of the registrations (last time I checked) in .us ccTLD were .com companies protecting their brand.

I am not saying .com will phase out at all.

In some markets, .com has already begun to be phased out and the bulk of those registrations in those markets are historical brand protection registrations. This effect is quite visible when a ccTLD becomes dominant in that country level market and the numbers of new registrations of ccTLD domains outstrips the numbers of new .com registrations.

I think it will take at least 4-5 years for these extensions to gain any credibility.

Agreed. Some will fail during that period. I think that ICANN missed the best window of opportunity to launch these new gTLDS by at least five years or so.

Regards...jmcc