The new ICANN TLD proposal
The organization managing all Top Level Domains, ICANN, has today announced the approval of a new proposal, which will allow basically anyone to get their own Top Level Domain. I may be conservative, longing for the good old days of the Internet, but I don't like this.
The Internet as it is right now is already a chaos. The list of Top Level Domains is growing fast. But it doesn't make things more clear. Take for instance the .jobs Top Level Domain. What exactly does this add to the available list? Most companies still list their vacancies on their website, and they'll probably keep doing this. Why? Well, potential candidates will get a good impression of the company, and (potential) clients will see that the company is quite busy because it is looking for new people, so it must be doing something good, right? Having job openings on your website is always good marketing. So why the hell add a new Top Level Domain for it?
With this new proposal accepted, as it is implemented (Q1 2009 most probably), organizations worldwide will be able to apply for their own Top Level Domain. In the buzz about this announcement on the web, I see examples such as .ebay. Now, please explain to me, aside from Ebay wanting to protect their trademark, why the hell would anyone want a .ebay address. What would be the purpose? There is only one Ebay, and it's easily reachable by going to Ebay.com (or any of the local versions).
I have this crazy theory about this whole proposal. It's a theory so wild that none of you would've ever thought of it. This theory consists of a single word.
MONEY
I don't know why, because I've always believed ICANN to be a non-profit organization put in place to ensure the safety and availability of the whole domain system, but it seems that ICANN is quite anxious to get new money in. I mean, it doesn't sound really useful, but well, what can you do? If you are a multi-million international company, you need to protect your trademark, so you will have to shell out the cash to register your own TLD. So it will be easy money for ICANN. Very easy money.
The only good thing that I've seen in the proposal is the fact that they also want to implement top level domains with other characters than the current limited set of 37 characters, so countries with different character sets, such as China, Japan, the Arab world and Russia, will finally be able to get their "native" domains.
Since the proposal has already been accepted, I'm afraid there will be little that can be done to stop this. I surely wonder how this will play out, but I'm not looking forward to this whole new dimension in the chaos of domains.
June 26, 2008 - tags: internet, tld, icann
Comments
Cal Evans: Yep, this is nothing more than a license for ICANN to print money. It does nothing to help the Internet and it will make life for small operators a lot harder.and I can think of a couple of domains I want to register under .jobs...but we won't go into that here.
=C=
June 26, 2008
Ivo: It's even sillier than .mobi, which also miserably failed.Regarding .ebay etc, I don't think the purpose is for anyone to register an address, but for ebay to have it's own tld so people can just go to ebay.
Well, any decent browser already does that if someone enters ebay in the address bar.
The domain business is tricky as it is (with the recent .co.nl scam over here e.g.), this will only make it more tricky.
.jobs; even if monsterboard etc. would use this extension, it still doesn't 'free up' the .com space as these companies will still also want the .com domain. So it doesn't create anything new, it just adds more aliases.
And the money thing is plausible, though I read somewhere that the introduction alone costs them about as much as they're getting from selling the domains.
June 27, 2008
matthijs: Funnily enough, the original www proposal by Tim Berners-Lee provided for something like this: he wanted URLs to be in reverse (com.leftontheweb.www, say). This way the TLD wouldn't be as important.Not sure what happened, actually.
June 29, 2008
left: Matthijs: That's an interesting way of organizing things, pretty much the same way Java organizes it's packages I guess.Yet, I'm sure the importance would've been the same, the location of the important part would've been different
June 29, 2008
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