The Internet To Suck a Little Bit More Next Year
If you happen to have at least $100,000USD or €64,000 or £50,000 and your own team of lawyers, you too can get your own personal Top Level Domain.
This week, in Paris, regulators from Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to radically change the way Top Level Domains are created.
A Top Level Domain (TLD) is the final segment of a domain name. For example, my blog’s URL is blog.techfun.org. That name tells us that blog is a host within the techfun domain which is within the ORG Top level domain.
Everyone knows about the earliest TLD’s including COM, NET, ORG, EDU, MIL, and GOV. Over the years that has expanded to a total of 21 TLD’s not including specific national TLD’s like US for the United States or DE for Germany. Some of those national TLDs have become popular due to the nation’s abbreviations similarity to English language words and abbreviations including Tuvalu’s “.tv”. The Federated States of Micronesia’s “.fm”, Djibouti’s “.dj” and Tonga’s “.to”.
More recently, ICANN introduced the BIZ TLD but adoption has been extremely slow. When the new BIZ TLD went live I was working for an Internet Service Provider and part of my job included maintaining our spam filters. The first thing I noticed in the weeks and months following was the sheer number of bogus and spamtastic BIZ domains flooding in to our servers.
In the early days of combating spam, a feature common on many mail servers was the ability to check to see if the domain portion of a sender’s email address was valid. Our servers used that, so if someone wanted to spam us from doctorsex@cheapbluesexpills.com they actually had to register the domain name “cheapbluesexpills.com”. Back then this was more expensive than it is now.
When the BIZ TLD was introduced, many registrars – like GoDaddy.com – offered very big discounts on the BIZ domains. This opened the door to spammers registering thousands and thousands of domain names to be used for a single mailing and then discarded. That poisoned the BIZ TLD for many folks and to this day I still let Spamassassin slightly bump up the spam score on any email I receive with a BIZ extension.
The new change that ICANN describes as the “Biggest Expansion to (the) Internet in Forty Years” takes the use of TLD’s to a whole new level. This new change will allow companies and people to apply to create their own TLD. For example, Coca-Cola can register a TLD of “COKE”. This would allow the use of mail addresses like webmaster@mail.coke or the creation of websites like http://www.coke or http://coupons.coke.
ICANN mentioned that there is already interest from various cities including New York City that want to create their own TLD – in that case, a site like http://mayor.nyc would be a possibility. Individuals, organizations, and corporations will all be able to apply for these new bits of Internet real estate.
The approval committees at ICANN will do its best to protect registered trademarks so there is no doubt who will end up owning .coke and .pepsi, but who is likely to get .cola or .soda? Company’s that wish to can submit objections to other applications but unless you have a retainer with an intellectual property law firm you may be out of luck when your small home business has a name that some bigger corporation decided it wants to own.
I wish I could articulate better why this whole idea disturbs me. I feel like the Internet has always been a kind of funky global neighborhood where a fetish shop might be ‘next door’ to an evangelical church. This kind of parceling off of the common Internet namespace feels like that neighborhood is at risk of being put in the shadow of huge custom condos that will block out the sun.
There is one bright side for non-English speaking nations:
“One of the most exciting prospect before us is that the expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Chairman. “This is going to be very important for the future of the Internet in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia.” The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.
Internet address suffix choice expanded
By Rob Minto in London
Published: June 27 2008 03:00 – Financial Times.
Businesses will be free to choose any suffix they please for their internet addresses after a decision yesterday to expand the choices beyond current staples such as “.com”, “.co” and “.org”.
The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to liberalise the online naming system – allowing the creation of customised domain names – follows a three-year project.
“What we are now considering is a global equivalent of people moving to liberalised telecommunication markets or electricity markets,” Paul Twomey, Icann’s chief executive, said at the organisation’s meeting in Paris.
Icann, a non-profit body that co-ordinates the naming system, plans to accept the first round of applications for new domain names in April or May next year. It expects the cost of registering a new suffix to be at least $100,000 (€64,00, £50,000) – far higher than the current price of a “.com” name, which is as little as $14.
Some analysts worry that the changes could yield more costs for businesses operating online as they try to protect their presence on the web.
The last large-scale domain launch – of “.biz” in 2001 – did not reduce the popularity and dependency on the “.com” suffix. Registrations for “.biz” have lagged far behind “.com”, with fewer than 2m names in use compared with more than 77m for “.com”. A 2002 Harvard Law School study found that about 30 per cent of “.biz” registrations were made by organisations that already owned the “.com” version of their name.
The new move is unlikely to cause an immediate surge in the number of customised domain names online.
Icann hopes the high cost and a rigorous application process will deter any “domain squatters”, who purchase company-related domain names and try to sell them back to the company for a profit.
Any disputes over names would be referred to an independent arbitrator, who would consider existing trademarks and intellectual property rights.
However, Alex Burmaster, an analyst at the internet research company Nielsen Netratings, said fraudsters and “domaineers” – who buy up groups of domain names – were likely to benefit from the changes.
“We could see an exponential rise in dispute cases,” he said. “The two biggest losers will be businesses and customers. It will be a big cost for companies, and confusing with all the potential domains.”
Jonathan Robinson, chief operating officer of NetNames, a consultancy and registration company, said he feared that the move “would dilute online brands, putting them at risk. I’m not convinced this is being done in the right way”.
Ken, if they use the localized versions of Google – specially if they use a non-English version – they are given the opportunity to search specifically for local pages. On http://www.google.co.uk you can search all of the web or “pages from the UK”.
As far as your .travel example. its all about the numbers. As most people are aware, people did not flock the .travel TLD specifically because it was so generic. Custom TLDs would not have that drawback.
Google may have specifically chosen not to let the .travel TLD affect weighting of results since it would have skewed existing results. They could decide to do the same to the new TLD’s as well if they chose.
As far as the Google results for .travel, keep in mind that if you search for hotel within the .travel TLD, Google has indexed just about1,110,000 pages. But if you search for hotel within the .com TLD there are over half a BILLION (547,000,000) pages so the .travel results in normal travel searches are like a needle in a haystack.
SEO is certainly a consideration for any brand owner considering a new TLD. If the ROI is positive (i.e. the revenue generated from a site exceeds the cost of managing the site; including owning the domain/extension) this would be a good and wise investment.
Does the extension really make a big impact to your google rankings? Take .TRAVEL again as an example. Enter ‘travel’ into google. I didn’t see a .TRAVEL site in the first 3 pages. (I like most users of google tend not to search deeper than 3 pages.)
Perhaps it is more important to consider the direct navigation habits of internet users. According to WebSideStory (2004) 67% of internet users arrive at a website via direct search. (More recent studies have suggested this might be higher!)
Do internet users search for URLs with extensions other than .com or their local country code extension? I am not sure they do because marketing departments tend not to invest in advertising new TLDs. Perhaps they know that it is very difficult to change established consumer behavior.
.HOTEL would be good for ANY hotel owner unless there is a radical change to the algorithms Google and other search engines use to rank search results.
Try this search – go to http://www.google.com and enter just NYC hotel and notice the order of the search results as it relates to the actual URL’s of the pages returned.
If Hilton or any other chain had the URL of http://www.BrandName.hotel it would have ranked higher than any of the hotels returned do now. As you can see its the travel aggregate sites like http://www.nyc.com/hotels and http://www.aboutnewyorkhotels.com that take top placement. I think ANY hotel chain would at least want to look into acquiring such a potent SEO tool for the same reason CocaCola wants to maintain its #1 spot for http://www.coca-cola.com on http://www.google.com/search?q=coke.
I think this will depend on the implementation rules & guidelines.
The launch processes used in recent history have all differed. .EU was a first come first served approach meaning that investing in technology and multiple accreditations to make applications improved your chances of securing a domain whereas .ASIA involved an auction process. At the end of the day for generic terms such as .HOTEL regardless of whether you have a prior right or not the entity willing to invest the most will have the most chance of securing the domain or extension (in this case).
I would ask the question that once you own .HOTEL then what?
Would a hotel chain actually want to own this? or would a registry wish to sell second level domains under the .HOTEL extension?
I believe hotel chains have already invested in advertising and marketing their .com or country code URL’s and in a similar way to .TRAVEL might invest to defend their brand but not to promote their brand.
From a registries perspective has .TRAVEL (or .mobi or .eu etc) really been a success and benefit to the internet? Do we see them marketed and advertised?
New TLDs will only be valuable if users are directly navigating to them and this will happen with marketing changing our habits.
Ken, good point. In the Financial Times articles they mentioned a “$100,000USD or €64,00 or £50,000″ application cost.
I’m not at all worried about established brands and multinational corporations that have already done the legal and marketing legwork to establish their trademarks and copyrights on there names.
Nobody is going to contest PepsiCo’s rights to .pepsi or .tostitos or .doritos. The problem I see will be with something like .hotel – who should own that? Will it end up being a first come first serve thing and Marriot or Hilton being able to beat out Holiday Inn or a privately owned single hotel that wants it?
Having worked with global corporations and brand owners for the past 8 years assisting them to develop domain name strategies that promote and protect their online corporate identity I can assure you that there is a distinctly luke warm reception from brand owners and trade mark owners already spending considerable budgets in defending their brands online.
The opening up of new TLDs represents less of a revenue opportunity (since most major corporations have already invested over many years in directing their customers to a particular URL) then it does a risk to their brands (the potential for a growth in infringement and thus the requirement of additional budgets which either proactively defending or reactively taking action).
Ultimately the degree to which this announcement actually changes the internet will depend on the implementation rules/guidelines and pricing. ICANN is projecting that the application process for new TLDs will not begin until sometime in Q2 of 2009 so we have a while to discuss!
This bothers me too after reading your post. But I am not sure how it will be used/misused? I wonder where the cutoff will be on who feels they need to get one of these. Obviously companies like Coke probably will. But I wonder if sites or companies that are smaller will feel pressure to spend the money to do it. It sure won’t affect little guys, but those in the middle might find a few new big hills on the “level playing field” of the internet.
Wills last blog post..Sole Food
I view this development as yet another example of pandering to corporations and their shareholders. IMO way back when corporations were given the same status as “persons” under the law something went amiss.
timethiefs last blog post..How and why to get your own domain