Domain name registration rules “about to get a lot crazier”
Category: Industry News: Trends
Lately, we’ve been discussing the world of domain names and domain name registration a lot here at the Aplus.Net Blog — how to successfully buy and sell domains, how to structure them, even how you can make money from the domain names you own but aren’t using.
And all of this discussion has revolved around the most fundamental domain naming strategy: attaching an effective name to an available suffix — also known as the TLD, or “top level domain,” the .net in aplus.net, for example, or the .com in amazon.com. In recent years, we’ve seen the TLD market grow by leaps and bounds. Where you could once only buy basic TLDs like .com, .net, and .org, there are now dozens to choose from, ranging from the affordable and accessible like .info to the expensive and highly specialized, like, say, .museum.
But, according to a recent article by TechNewsWorld.com’s Renay San Miguel, all this will soon change, in a revolutionary way. In an article entitled “ICANN Approves Dot-KitchenSink Internet Address Policy“, Mr. San Miguel tells us that ICANN has recently approved a new policy that allows organizations to name their domain name anything they want. Their TLD doesn’t have to be a preset suffix, it can be their company brand, like .coke or .nike.
From the article:
The Internet is about to get a lot crazier. Anyone who’s willing to fork over a fairly grand sum, possibly in the $100,00 ball park, will be able to buy the rights to a branded domain. That means no one who’s anyone will be a lowly dot-com anymore — and the practice of snatching up domain names with the hope of selling them for big bucks later will be a lot less lucrative.
The universe of Internet domains will soon experience a Big Bang, thanks to Thursday’s vote by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Latest News about Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approving a new system for handing out Web addresses.
Corporations and other public and private entities will no longer be limited to Web extensions like .com, .net or .org; for a fee that will likely start at US$100,000, a company can register a more personalized top-level domain (TLD) with its own brand name extension, such as .coke, .apple or .prada. Cities will be able to apply for .newyork, .berlin or .moscow.
ICANN also voted for the first time to allow non-Roman characters in Web addresses, which means that Chinese companies can register suffixes in Mandarin script, Russian companies in Cyrillic, and so on.
Beginning in spring 2009, the Internet address possibilities will truly be .endless.
Although this opens up a whole new world of legal headaches (with cybersquatting about to get a lot more lucrative), the possibilities it allows are nothing short of world-changing as far as online business is concerned. Some say it will make the value of existing domain names plummet; others say it will add value to the old .com standards. Obviously, ICANN wouldn’t have approved the process if they weren’t confident that it would have a positive effect. But given the dramatic nature of this change, it’s hard to say for sure just what the ultimate impact will be.
Either way, the plan (which is still not 100 percent carved in stone) would go into effect in the second quarter of 2009, according to the current proposal. (Read the official ICANN news release on this topic here.)
What do you think? Is it a good idea to make the domain name system this changeable? Will this new policy endanger an important fundamental of the World Wide Web, if suddenly any brand name can become a TLD? Or is the logical next step in a marketplace where TLDs already number in the dozens (or hundreds, if you count country code TLDs)?
I think the idea is great, but I think it should cost someone who so vain to need their own branded TLD allot more. Like 100 mil. And use the money to enforce all the illegal name squatting like when AT&T registers my parents business name. You know there will be several hundred corps that will still jump at the idea of having there own TLD (microsoft, google, yahoo, coke, pepsi, apple,…. shortest list possible.)
Actually, Matt, that’s pretty close to how I understand this happening. These branded domain names are certainly not going to be cheap. Maybe not $100 million, but up there. And hopefully ICANN will use that money for the general good of the domain name community.