Quadrille - 4:42 pm on Jan 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Dot Com Rules, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. In some countries - eg Australia - there are benefits to local sites in local TLDs; but in other countries - like the UK - that advantage is smaller, and if anything, .com is growing rather than shrinking - many large UK companies use .com even for purely local (UK) use.

Why? Because with .com you automatically have 'recognition', as well as a serious advantage in international and US search.

Sure, some local companies will increasingly favour local domains, as their local rules make that advantageous - where local usage has increased, it's probably as much about price as anything else, and don't forget that millions of spam sites use local domains, where they'd have probably used .biz or .info a few years ago (no longer so cheap!).

Internationally, I see no signs at all of .com failing; .biz, .info. .#*$! were all exposed as scams to get people to buy defensively, and any new TLDs at international level will likely go the same way.

If you wanted your company to be seen as #1 in world, would you seriously look at anything other than .com?