Next month, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that largely controls the world of domain names and registries) will be holding a forum in Cairo, Egypt to determine whether or not to add more new top-level domain names to those currently offered.

A top-level domain (TLD) is the term for the basic suffixes that all domain names must have, such as .com, .net, and .org. Since the introduction of newer TLDs such as .info a few years ago, there has been a renewed interest in domain name activity and speculation.

This news comes on top of a huge announcement this summer that ICANN will also be expanding TLDs to include customized, brand name-oriented names — .nike, for example, or .disney could become viable TLDs under the proposed new rules that may go into effect as early as next year.

All such plans to expand the range of available TLDs have drawn criticism. Some say that the wider variety of TLDs mean that online branding is getting watered down. Since there are so many new options, it’s hard to tell just which is the most legitimate. Are companies supposed to buy new domain names in each new TLD as it becomes available? If they don’t, what are the risks of someone else snatching it up?

ICANN defends its plans, claiming that it’s trying to provide online businesses with an increased number of options: “It’s an expansion in Internet real estate so that people have got more choices in the kind of searches they do,” said Paul Levins, vice president of corporate affairs for ICANN (as quoted in the Orlando Sentinel last week).

Yet, with these new customized domains likely costing at least $100,000, it’s not at all clear what kind of advantages they’re going to offer in the long run; and it seems apparent that smaller companies will have a harder time becoming competitive under the new rules of the online business game.

More from the Orlando Sentinel:

Supporters say the move will make browsing the Internet more intuitive and also give companies a new way to reinforce their brand names. But others warn that it could confuse consumers and become a headache for companies that may not want to purchase a bunch of new domains.

Besides the obvious benefit of a company such as Disney being able to direct visitors to a URL such as “parks.Disney” instead of the current “Disney.com/parks,” the expansion of domain names could benefit geographic regions.

For instance, if the .orlando domain were established by the city government or an economic-development group, it could streamline searching for local services by having a directory of plumbers listed at “plumbers.orlando,” or a list of swimming pools at “pools.orlando.” Businesses licensed by the city also could be granted a .orlando address. …

And since it won’t be a first-come, first-served basis, businesses and individuals will have a better shot at getting their desired Web addresses than they did during the first Internet gold rush. …

Levins said applicants will have to pay at least $100,000 to apply and will have to prove that if they are granted a top-level domain, they are capable of then selling Web addresses within that domain … .

“This is no $6 exercise,” said Levins, adding that an independent board will oversee the process. “Running a top-level domain is actually a big business.”

Palage said cities and special-interest groups such as the National Rifle Association or the University of Florida Alumni Association could see the biggest benefit from having their own top-level domains because it’s similar to offering specialty license plates with that group’s name on them.

“[If I am a business,] I want a .orlando because I want to associate with my customers to show I am a member of the local community,” Palage said.

A spokeswoman for the Walt Disney Co. said the company is aware of the new domain-name plan but would not comment.

Palage said many companies aren’t pleased with the new domains because it means that after years spending time and money to protect their brands with the existing domains, they’re going to have to do it again.

The law firm Cash Klemchuck Powers Taylor LLP also envisions negative outcomes resulting from these changes. From a news release issued by that firm:

“ICANN’s goal is to give end-users more choice in their presence on the Internet and stimulate competition,” said Darin M. Klemchuk. “However, critics have compared the introduction of new domains with the printing of money: the value of your current registration is decreased because of possible brand dilution and public confusion, while the cost of protecting one’s brand increases.”

ICANN encourages users to avoid registering gTLDs that are confusingly similar to an already existing gTLD in order to prevent confusion in the marketplace. The introduction of new gTLDs will increase the open avenues for registering confusingly similar variations of brand names. ICANN encourages applicants to adopt curative measures, such as Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), to cure such confusion. Additional preventative measures include the registration of many domain names. “With the multiplication of top level domain registrations, businesses will experience difficulty in policing their brands online and will likely incur substantial costs,” noted Mr. Klemchuk. “This expansion of domain names will also make phishing schemes more prevalent. All of this will require businesses to be more vigilant and proactive in protecting their online brands.”

Read “Explosion of New Domain Names Presents Risks for Online Brands” here. Read “What’s in a dot.com name … ” in the Orlando Sentinel here.

This is huge, huge step forward for the group that oversees the development of the internet. The board of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers–ICANN–unanimously approved some proposals that could open up domains past the standard .com, .org, .info, etc. This could open a lot of new websites in the future that are tailored to industry-specific websites, maybe like www.mymanolos.shop or www.arthurbryant.kc, for example. They look a little strange now, but I bet they grow quickly! Read the whole article here.

ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organization that oversees the management of domain names and IP address assignments) recently made an announcement that they were initiating steps to eliminate “domain tasting”.

What is “domain tasting”? According to ICANN, it’s “the use of the Add Grace Period to test the profitability of a domain name registration. The AGP is a five-day period following the initial registration of a domain name when the registration may be deleted and a credit can be issued to a registrar.”

So, someone can buy a domain name, test it out online, and if it proves not to be a very effective domain name, nullify the purchase and receive his or her money back. Apparently a widespread problem in the Internet business world, ICANN feels that the practice must be stopped in order to keep the online business playing field level for everyone.

“Domain tasting has been an issue for the Internet community and ICANN is offering this proposal as a way to stop tasting,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “Charging the ICANN fee as soon as a domain name is registered would close the loophole used by tasters to test a domain name’s profitability for free.”

AGP was originally introduced by registries so registrars could avoid costs if a domain name was mistyped or misspelled during the registration process. It is part of the .com, .net, .org, .info, .name, .pro, and .biz registry contracts.

Tasting has been a serious challenge for the Internet community and has grown exponentially since 2004. In January 2007 the top 10 domain tasters accounted for 95% of all deleted .com and .net domain names — or 45,450,897 domain names out of 47,824,131 total deletes.

The proposal will be part of the ICANN budget process for the fiscal year starting 1 July 2008. The early draft version of that budget will be released for and discussed at ICANN’s New Delhi meeting later this month. After public discussions of this proposal and other budget issues, the proposed budget will be released for addition discussions by 17 May 2008 and be voted on at the board meeting to be held during the ICANN meeting in Paris in June. ICANN accredited registrars representing two-thirds of fees collected will be asked to approve the proposal.

This is all from ICANN’s recent press release on the subject. The question that some industry observers are asking: Is “domain tasting” really that serious a threat? Does it cost ICANN that much money? Is it possible that this is a way to eliminate a consumer safety net and thereby maximize cash flow into ICANN? Is it really hurting the online business world to allow people to test out domain names before purchasing them? Or do the problems perhaps go deeper than that? We can’t offer judgment on that here, but anytime regulations such as this are altered, it’s worth taking note of, at the very least.

To read ICANN’s official press release on the topic, please click here.

Earlier this week, ICANN issued its 2007 annual report, a slickly put-together PDF document outlining the organization’s goals, achievements, and initiatives for the new year.

While not exactly red-hot news (overviews of board membership changes, bylaw fulfillment, litigation status, that sort of thing), the report is interesting reading, and anyone involved in the domain registration or web hosting industries should be aware of the changes being planned by this very powerful organization. (As it turns out, ICANN has some ambitious projects in the works.)

But it’s hard to read the gushingly enthusiastic report without having a skeptical moment or two. It’s absolutely understandable for any organization to be self-promoting in the reports it issues to the public, but there are perhaps more than a few souls who might take issue with some of these claims. For example, one cannot dispute the facts behind ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey’s words that ICANN “now produces more up-to-date and accessible information that allows a wider range of people to participate in our processes” — and yet, some people might single out the words “more” and “wider” as indicative that the organization still has a long road ahead of it before it achieves the kind of transparency it seems to be looking for.

For the most part, though, the report focuses on ICANN’s initiatives for the future, which are always good to know given its huge influence. Per Mr. Twomey’s pages, ICANN

made enormous progress on two developments that will change the Internet as we know it: the creation of new generic toplevel domains (new gTLDs) and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) concluded almost two years of policy development work to develop a fair and efficient process for introducing new gTLDs. The GNSO’s work was guided by advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee and by ICANN’s core values of fostering choice and competition while preserving the security and stability of the Internet. The GNSO recommendations will be considered by the ICANN Board of Directors in early 2008. Pending approval by the Board, a big staff priority for 2008 will be the implementation of new gTLDs.

On Internationalized Domain Names, we passed several major milestones that bring us closer to making a truly multilingual Internet a reality. The first was the successful laboratory testing of IDNs in November 2006. This paved the way for the next and most exciting step: inserting test IDNs in 11 languages in the root zone. While these “example.test” domain names are for evaluation only, they are an important step towards the expected deployment of IDN TLDs in 2008.

Read the entire report here, and feel free to sound off in the comments section.

Happy holidays!

It’s a problem that needed to be addressed eventually — long ago, say many people. But even those people may admit that it’s an extremely difficult problem to solve. And hence, the delay.

We’re referring to today’s news from the Washington Post that ICANN is ramping up testing of domain names in alternate alphabets. (Click here to read the original article, “A Script for Every Surfer”)

Since the Internet came into widespread use, those among the 70 percent of the world that doesn’t speak English have argued that the Web is inaccessible. So next week the nonprofit group contracted by the U.S. government to run the Internet will begin testing domain names in other alphabets.

On Monday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will conduct a test to see whether domains written entirely in foreign scripts can work without crashing the Net.

ICANN had already begun this process on a small scale by combining some non-English alphabets with English extensions — such as [Chinese text].com. However, today’s news announces a more concerted effort to resolve this longstanding issue.

The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and linguistic sovereignty, alongside accusations of American “digital colonialism,” have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web.

Experts say the difficulties of typing in a foreign script have probably held back development of online economies abroad … Some advocates of internationalizing the Internet have accused ICANN of ignoring the needs of the developing world.

However, just summarizing the problems facing such an endeavor provides a good deal of insight as to why this development has been so long in coming:

Countries with slightly different versions of the same script have fought over spelling. Debates have also raged over which corporate, sovereign and ethnic interests should control which domains. VeriSign, for example, is the U.S. registry that manages all the domains that end in .com, which represent half of all the domains in the world. Should it also be given control over multilingual domains that end in some translated version of .com? Or should countries have the right to control all domains in their own national languages? What about languages that cross borders, such as Arabic?

Next week’s experiments use the domain name “example.test” translated into 11 languages. A previous model, however, used “hippopotamus” instead of “test.” These plans went awry when an Israeli registrar realized the Hebrew word ICANN thought meant “hippopotamus” was an expletive and threatened to involve the Israeli government.

Some countries have taken matters into their own hands.

At least a dozen countries, including China and Saudi Arabia, have created their own domains in different alphabets and their own Internets to support these domains. A Russian newspaper article last July reported that President Vladimir Putin was commissioning the creation of a Cyrillic Internet. Users of Russia’s Internet, like current users of China’s and Saudi Arabia’s, could surf the Web without going through U.S.-controlled ICANN servers.

Without coordination, some experts say, these new networks will increasingly fragment and destabilize the Internet.

Others say patching these countries’ Internets together into a “federation” of Internets could preserve global interconnectivity.

What do you think? Are there political reasons for the delay in this much-needed development? Or was it a natural delay based on the inherent difficulty in solving such a multi-pronged dilemma? Sound off in the comments section and let us know your thoughts.