From the Paris ICANN’s meeting, where every seat was filled, more than 1,400 participants attended the new top-level domain (TLD) workshop Monday afternoon.
Reports from the meeting, have quoted various people having some negative comments about allowing hundreds of new extensions,
Jay Scott Evans, former chair of ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency and senior legal advisor for Yahoo. said “Why should brand owners have to invest huge amounts of money to protect their brands,” he asked, simply because ICANN did not put the trademarks on a reserved list containing geographical names that all governments would have had to block in all TLD zones.
“The day is coming when some aggressive trademark owner will start litigation against either ICANN, the registry or the registrar,” Evans said. All of these parties knew that trademark infringement was a possibility, “because it had been happening for years and you facilitated it and are liable as a facilitator,” he charged. Brandowners should be protected because hundreds of thousands of their customers were misled by infringed or squatted websites, he said.
Caroline Perriard from Nestlé warned that users would be confused by too many extensions.
John Berryhill, on of our favoirte lawyers, stated that many “landowners” in cyberspace fear that prices would go down if there was a bigger supply of “land.” “It is a question of whether colonisation of new continents would be allowed”, “trial and error and the choices of the seven billion internet users would lead to the winning TLDs.”
However in support of the new extensions was Rob Hall, CEO of Canadian Momentous (pool.com) who said many companies should register their own extension, like .nestlé or .ebay to profit from the domain name system extensions.
Paul Twomey of ICANN said that “the impact on the Internet would be similar to the phenomenon that hit the TV world, which multiplied channels from just, a few to hundreds.”
The proposal will be submitted to a vote on Thurday.
Again for domainers we see no good coming from the mass approval of hundreds of new extensions.
And from all reports the most lightly new extenstions will be for major cities around the world.
There are already groups form for .berlin, .paris and .nyc. All other possiblities are just that at this time.
Even the dreaded .xxx extension is being mentioned again.
The uncertainly of the number of applications and the effect that they will have could have a chilling effect on the domain industry as far as acqusitions go until the picture become clearer.
I’m not concerned if it comes to pass, as mass extensions will just equal mass confusion…pushing the now massively confused to tack on the .com to whatever word or phrase they saw or heard.
Gold will always be gold, and diamonds will always be diamonds…no matter how many other metals or materials anyone ever comes up with.
Steve
Lets hope
I am not worried about more TLD. The brain only has so much room. We already own most of the TLD brain cells.
Domain names are the primary way of mapping where domains are on the web, The keyword in backlink is golden, .com & country codes have kudos & credibility so I tend to click the keword but if the content is poor the public will not give a toot, they will go back to scanning the search engine listings and try another one. In SEO terms the keyword gives you a leading edge The search engine bots do not care about dot whatever. I have never understood where the presumption of default to .com’s comes from everyone I know uses the search engines for all the options available on the first two pages
The tangible thing for the customer is the product, the domain extension offers credibility, gold & diamonds can be flawed and I will not go back to the jeweller. The brain has more than enough room to work that one out.
I have .com’s and country codes and admit to not being in a position to build large authorative websites with quality content that reflects the url in order to capitalise on the domain extention so they are parked which does nothing for credibility of . com
Great post.
If many more ltd’s are being approved that only means that the .com will be more valuable.
So let the new ltd’s come out.
A Monet painting just sold for over $80M this week. How many works of art have been created since that painting was done? A powerful keyword.com will only appreciate in value. More filler only makes it rarer in comparison.
Don’t mean to throw this topic on a tangent but, Mike, what are your thoughts on IDN domains? I don’t remember you ever writing about them (or any of the other domain big guys for that matter).
Tony
I don’t understand IDN’s. Never took the time to figure it out and have no “feel” of which ones are good or not.
Most successful domainers have a gut “feel” about domains.
If you don’t understand or have a feel for the space we stay out.
Certainly for those who have a “feel’ for them and an understanding of there use and value there is opportunity.
Technology changes – recognize it and stay ahead of it. This represents a larger shift in Internet navigation and coincides with the rise in popularity of keyword use. Look to browser FireFox 3 and search engine portals that provide you possible destinations as you type.
I see this as more dangerous to Internet users in the long run then good. Eventually we will loose the concept of TLD and transition to DIRECT Keyword navigation. Just as Hotel.com is a category killer .hotel will become the new category killer. To see how this would work type in a random string of characters with the tld .ws. Notice you are not given a navigation error but an ad. When you own the tld ICANN gives you the right to handle how traffic is routed within that tld to include names NOT registered. Given this ability the next evolutionary step is to simply lose the need for a period or dot and viola you have direct keyword navigation. This change of losing the dot would likley happen through a browser modification that automatically adds it for any single character string typed into the navigation bar. Typing “hotel” in the browser navigation will take you to wherever the owner of the hotel tld wants you to go.
In essence ICANN is sponsoring a land rush for ultimate category killers that in the short term appear to ease the frustration of buying a domain but in the end they will have eliminated the initial reasoning of tld’s. The ability to add billions of sub names based off the tld. ICANN instead will have found they pushed people to buy tlds to maintain a good flow of keyword based traffic.
If you thought the early days of domain name registration was bad at $50 or $100 per name imagine paying $50k for a name. It will be expensive, but I will gladly pay the price to own an ultimate category killer such as .candy!