ICANN, an independent body responsible for organizing the Internet, plans to press ahead with plans to expand the number of possible website addresses despite criticism from industry and concerns from some law enforcement groups.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which decides who gets to manage .com, .net and other domains to the right of the period in a URL, plans to begin accepting applications next week for a hugely expanded number of Web domain options.
an independent body responsible for organizing the Internet
Naturally .com will suffer most. The first blow to .com was when ccTLDS got popular in their respective countries. In countries like UK, Germany, China and India etc you will hardly see any local business using .com.
Dot com is the default extension for US (in spite of having its own ccTLD .us). Majority of the nice .com’s are still not developed. Their owners ask extortionate price for them. The market had to correct itself. Well done, ICANN!
So if people prefer com to .us why would they prefer a .nyc? Or a .la?
Why are there even more .us domains undeveloped [than .com]? And why are those prices usually incredibly much cheaper compared to the equivalent .com?
So if people prefer com to .us why would they prefer a .nyc? Or a .la?
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.
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.
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.And this is based on what? The number of UK registered .com domains is probably less than half that of the number of registered .uk domains. In Germany, the number of German registered .com domains is probably just over one third (~33%) of the numbers of registered .de domains. The level of ccTLD growth far outstrips that of .com growth in these ccTLD dominant markets and this is actually a global trend that is spreading. Once a ccTLD reaches critical mass, the emphasis on .com becomes less and most of the .com registrations are historical registrations. The databases here track about 5 million .uk domains and all the main gTLDs. I could probably do some kind of usage analysis over .uk domains/websites and UK hosted gTLD domains. Most business is local and the ccTLD is still the best option for accessing those markets.
Most business is local? No. Most businesses are local, most business is NOT. The number of local businesses may be large, but they are nearly all small businesses.That's the characteristic that determines whether a TLD is successful or not - the fact that small businesses use it. Usage cascades from that point onwards so that the TLD's use becomes an automatic choice for any new business. Many new .com domains are being registered by ccTLD registrants for brand protection. However rather than the .com being used as the primary brand site, the .com is pointed to the ccTLD.
Search Google (or Bing, if you insist) and see how many local sites turn up in the top ten, in any category where 'local' isn't the name of the game (eg bars, butchers, non-chain garden centres).I don't have a very high opinion of Google's expertise when it comes to local search outside of the US.
And I'd guess the number of moribund or dormant local sites beats the similar .coms by many a mile; a dumped local site will stay dumped - but there's a very healthy (if very scammy) .com resale market.Building a good timeline of web development in a TLD has been made a bit more difficult by the use of CMSes like Joomla and Wordpress but it is not impossible. I'd have to dig up the precise figures but between 20% and 40% of sites in some TLDs do not change over the course of a year.
And the number of visitors to .com site dwarfs the rest put together.This is the classic dotCOMmunist defence. :) In business, all the traffic in the world is no good if that traffic doesn't convert.
The TLD debate is not just about numbers, it's about marketing and aspiration: and no-one with aspirations goes for .biz, .info ... and in many cases, they won't go for local.What most people never see is that many TLDs live and die without ever having being developed. People see TLDs being measured in millions or tens of millions of domains, but the reality is that the level of development can vary from 10% to 40% depending on the TLD. This is only something that you see when you do large website surveys and it is often in the best interests of the registries to do small surveys and extrapolate the results of checking a few thousand websites to cover millions of websites.
The TLD debate is not just about numbers, it's about marketing and aspiration: and no-one with aspirations goes for .biz, .info ... and in many cases, they won't go for local.
Global businesses, whether in China, Germany or any other country, use .com and they will keep using .com in future, as they don't have any choice.
@tangor
But the recent .3x managed to fill coffers.
Oh but there is another choice for Europeans and that is .eu.
Secondly both are regional extensions.
This kind of extensions will serve like corner shops compared to a supermarket.
