ICANN Approves .anything Domains

[engine]

ICANN Approves .anything Domains [latimesblogs.latimes.com]

The body that controls the way Internet domain names work, known as ICANN, has voted to open up the naming system so that any established organization with enough cash can apply to create its own version of .com, .org or .gov.

In the for-profit world, that means that instead of going to coke.com or nike.com, you might be able to go to drink.coke or justdoit.nike. Nonprofit groups could reserve the .school domain and hand one out to every elementary school. Cities could consolidate their online presence at .nyc or .losangeles. And interest groups could stake out their own corner of the Web by offering every auto junkie a .car domain name, every law firm a .law address, and every restaurant a site that ended with .food.

But just like real estate in the real world, this new virtual land won't come cheap. The price tag to get a new domain created is $185,000. Only "established public or private organizations" can apply, and all applications must prove they have the technical capability necessary to keep a domain running.

[TinkyWinky]

Sorry - ridiculous!

How can this possibly benefit the Internet when Average Joe will have no idea what they are doing if they start having to remember .complete .and .utter .cr4p.

[true_INFP]

www.widget

Hmm, does that look like an incomplete domain name? It's not! It's our new generic top-level domain name ("widget").

(And we're sure people won't even think about trying the correctly typed www.widget.com version instead. Does it matter that poeple have been used to seeing the select few gTLDs for decades?)

[StoutFiles]

This is just a cash grab for ICANN. $185,000 to start, $25,000 a year to keep it running.

[maximillianos]

Wow on the pricing. Drop in the bucket for big brands.

I thought generics were not allowed, only brands? Is that true?

Or can anyone purchase generic versions of keyword tlds?

[StoutFiles]

I thought generics were not allowed, only brands? Is that true?

Not sure yet. Obviously pepsi could purchase .pepsi, but unsure if they can purchase pop and/or soda. I don't know why they'd purchase .pepsi though since no other company could due so due to infringement.

Or can anyone purchase generic versions of keyword tlds?

I can't see search engines giving any value to keyword domains. The only one it might use is .#*$! as a filter.

[Manga]

This is just plain silly. Nobody is going to type-in .coke or .pepsi or .nyc or .paris etc. just like nobody is going to type-in .co or .info or .biz or any of that other crap that is out there.

[maximillianos]

Biggest hurdle I see is no matter what folks are still going to add a dot com to the end when they type it in.

[i_am_dhaval]

so price are to high?

comaan man can not afford?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

BAD - Every single time someone forgets to put a space after a period it will be seen as a domain name.oops I forgot the space and created "name.oops" just there, see that? Did I just give the owner of name.oops props BY ACCIDENT? Did my web-page auto-link it? oi.

edit: This is going to cause search engines a headache if they look at domain mentions as a metric.

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 2:00 pm (utc) on Jun 20, 2011]

[brotherhood of LAN]

I wonder what domainers think about the potential explosion of TLDs and any effect on domain valuations.

[Seo_Mike]

Obviously a ICANN cash grab.............when and where does this madness end?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Obviously a ICANN cash grab

Perhaps not, maybe the price was set high to keep it's use limited which brings up 2 more questions...

#1 - Legality.You can't gouge people with high prices to keep number of sales low in some countries.

#2 - When will the price of .com's be going up exponentially to limit use too?


Grrrr - I forgot to space Legality and You above and created a mention for legality.you. Sure glad the forum didn't auto-link it since it's soon to be a domain.

[piatkow]

Biggest hurdle I see is no matter what folks are still going to add a dot com to the end when they type it in.

Considering the number of times that I have had example.com "corrected" to www.example.com I agree with that 101%

[muejl1]

A bit more info on this via BoingBoing.net:

The domains -- which will include the names of cities, lots of abstract nouns, and many other words -- are staunchly opposed by the entertainment industry for obscure reasons (best guess is that they worry that if there are more possible domains, it'll be harder to police trademarks and copyright enforcement bots will have to employ larger tables, both of which are pretty thin excuses for what's been rather a lot of outrage). Inside word is that they're going to sue ICANN to stop the domains' rollout, and that there's been some sneaky stuff snuck into IANA (the entity that contracts with ICANN to manage the domain system) to force ICANN to reverse this.

One more quirk of the new domains: I'm told by a reliable source that they'll be differentially priced from the get-go -- that is, of the domains that you can buy (not .SONY, but maybe .LONDON), you'll pay more for registering common words than for nonsense strings, shorter words may cost more than longer ones, etc. Rather than providing a windfall to the people who grab the largest number of potentially lucrative identifiers, the domain registrars will use auction mechanisms and other pricing schemes to price their virtual goods out of the gate. Of course, with 400-800 new generic top-level domains, the artificial scarcity that made sex.com and so forth so valuable will be largely obliterated, which may take the prices down a peg or two.

[bhartzer]

As I understand it, though, you'll have to pay $185,000 to get new TLD considered. So, I suspect that we won't end up with a huge number of new TLDs--just those who can afford to spend $185,000.

I still expect Godaddy to try to get .godaddy, though. I won't be registering myname.godaddy.

[wheel]

There's some money to be made. .mortgages, .insurance, etc. car.insurance. rates.mortgages. or even bob.mortgages and stan.mortgages. Get 185 of those a year for $1000 and you're break even. After that, it's how well you can market.

[Seb7]

how does this effect domains registered with new.net ?

[httpwebwitch]

This opens up some choice real estate in the domain world.

Seriously if someone wants to pony up for a new venture, I'd like to grab .mail and .chat

[engine]

I'm yet to be convinced of the value of the branded ones. Yes, I can see value, but is it real value, or vanity value.

[wheel]

It's not necessarily about value. It's about opening up restrictions. What's so special about a limited number of extensions? I can name my personal computer files with whatever extension I want. The current restrictions are arbitrary.

[httpwebwitch]

fantastic that we'll be able to register gTLD's in non-ascii characters. People who surf in Arabic and Chinese have wanted this for like ever.

I hope ICANN keeps the reins and doesn't allow anyone to set up .cöm or .nėt or .orġ

[robho]

The current valuations on most .info and (especially) .biz domains shows how worthless most of these new extensions will be.

There's no shortage of .com's, no reason to add more extensions. What's needed is some education in the market, to let people know that it's possible to buy a domain second-hand.

Most small business owners think if a domain is gone, it's gone. It's not, it's just waiting for a buyer - every domain has a price.

It's like thinking you have to build a new office on a new street, because the existing street is full of offices. Look at the "for sale" and "to let" signs on that street before building new offices in a secondary location ...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Local will be locked up. People will look up widgets.mytown when they want widgets from their town. Managed properly such sites could become dominant because they bypass search.

There is a cult-like group of geo-domain owners who know the power of an exact match example.com but I think anything.mytown trumps even those in potential.

[MikeNoLastName]

The original article is ambiguous. At one point it mentions the drink and shoe companies, but then says ONLY public or non-profit organizations can apply? That would rule out public or private COMPANIES or private organizations. No?

1. I agree with the others who think noone will be able to remember them properly anyway. They'll be about as valuable as .net, .info, etc.

2. They should not allow anyone without a provable brand name ownership or copyright buy them. a. This will eliminate cybersquatting and artificially bidding up the TLD's b. This will eliminate claims on city, state and country names (you can't copyright these, at least in the US).

3. The only way I see this working is if, like with other TLDs, the owner is REQUIRED to register domains for anyone who wants one FOR A REASONABLE maximum price set by ICAAN across ALL TLDs. And maybe require that netsol and godaddy, etc be allowed to also if they choose (with a royalty to the owner of course). The intent should be to EXPLOIT the TLD, NOT to hog it! So if I want to buy domain www.ihate.anycompany the owner of the .anycompany TLD HAS to allow me, or the first requesting buyer, to do it, just like all the other TLDs. Plus every TLD should be up for auction EVERY 1-4 years. Either way, this begins to put the internet out of the range of the average developer and you are going to have big businesses or conglomerates buying up key TLDs (.newyork, .airfares, .hotels, .realestate, .government, .#*$!) to use exclusively for themselves, just so others can't.

4. Search engines are going to have headaches trying to determine how many domains in a TLD belong to the same owner, or others. Unlike with subdomains where you can assume they all belong to the same owner.

5. What is going to be the "standard" domain for the TLD? www.index.TLD? www.tld.tld? www..tld (will you be allowed to do that? Hmmmm)
Repeat step 1... It's just a longer name for potential visitors to remember.

[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 1:08 am (utc) on Jun 21, 2011]

[Elsmarc]

People will look up widgets.mytown when they want widgets from their town.

Of course, there is that matter of there being more than one town with the exact same name. The city I live in has the exact same name as 2 other cities in my state alone. Think of the world. My opinion: Content and a long term internet presence will remain king.

[Olney]

I could see this working for large brands. I'm not looking at this from the perspective of a brand opening up registrations for just anyone.

Example Apple create iTools which gave us mac.com email addresses.

1. What if apple gives up YourName.mac instead of the new YourName@.me
2. Canon I see them most likely adding a service that they could possibly better control & give their customer base photo or video space integrated into their camera attach your Username.Canon & upload it into their cloud service etc.

It gives a chance to do new marketing & not just think of if someone will type something in or not by mistake to determine value. It's about use & I think some global corporations(not all) will be able to use this very efficiently to expand services.

[dailypress]

gets better everyday :) The .Whatever address
[finance.yahoo.com...]

1) I think the only extensions that will get type in traffic are keywords ending with .com , . s e x and . x x x

2)Never mind companies, but will our celebrities, president or candidates .soon promote themselves as TLDs? . obama and . clinton ? ;)

[Joseuonline]

This looks like it's going to be spammers paradise.

If enough people mistype what's out there now enough times to maintain some domainers, I can imagine there's no lack of creativity to take advantage of .all .the. words .we .know.

My first thought is that high prices will prevent any Joe Blow to hog 100 domains, like most people do these days. But at the same time, if you're somewhat recognizable, you'll have to pay by the nose to prevent these creative idiots to take advantage of ie. nike.running, nike.runing...

...hm...I can see some regulation addressing this, but we won't know what to fight until they put these out there.

[engine]

I tracked down ICANN's announcement, for the record.

ICANN Approves Historic Change to Internet's Domain Name System

[icann.org]

"ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today's decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind," said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN.