ICANN Proposal Would Allow Companies To Create Their Own TLDs

[mandy]

The proposal to allow users to create their own top level domains could offer up millions of new variations for web addresses.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the main oversight agency for top level domains (TLDs) and regulator of the internet, is poised to make one of the biggest changes in the internet world by offering endless variations on domain addresses.

The proposal, which is being discussed at the ICANN conference in Paris this week, would allow companies to purchase new generic top-level domains ending in almost anything they wished. Rather than have a domain that ends .com or .co.uk, an individual or company could have a domain that ended .itpro or .ebay...

full article: http://www.itpro.co.uk/603930/icann-prop...me-changes

[mandy]

Update:

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 (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... 

full article: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/63599...1214650593

[regic]

for a fee that will likely start at US$100,000

There goes my dream of owning .tulip 

[mandy]

A related article:

Many businesses have pointed out that the new system could be very costly.

"The major issue with the potentially large number of new TLDs is going to be for brand owners who will want to protect their trademarks," said Mr Eggensperger.

"For a major pharmaceutical business, the cost of registering all of their trademarks when a new trademark is released runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds."

Others point out that some generic domain names - such as .news or .sport - could become subject to contention and a bidding war...

full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7475986.stm

[regic]

My personal opinion is that a flood of new extensions will have little impact on the well established TLDs that preceded them

http://dnjournal.com/newsletters/2008/june.htm

:ditto:

[mandy]

The losers in this case will be the remaining 90 percent majority of the global businesses that are somewhat chasing illusionary fame and are still convinced that their dysfunctional names are real winners.

They believe that by hopping all over the world with new suffixes, they will be able to push their names to the very top -- and they never will. Cyber identities such as dynamic.net, dynamic.biz, dynamic.info or dynamic.dynamic could be of a single business empire, or many different ones.

The fact remains, it will never become an exclusive identity as long as it is grossly diluted. Today, a huge portion of businesses are in serious duplication or global language confusion mess. When the laws of corporate nomenclature are sacrificed over logo-based identity that creates a false illusion of fame, this disregard for the value of alpha-structure will now once again result in failure. ..

full article: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/The-...1215079966

[jezebel]

.tard has a nice ring to it.

[accentnepal]

This announcement at first was met by panic in the domain world. Some investors thought that increased supply would mean decreased demand for their domains.

The dust has settled a bit now, and the consensus is that primary extensions - particularly .com and country codes used in their country - will be affected very little by this. One exception may be the very highest value domains - why buy hotel.com for $10 million when you can buy .hotel?

But who would own .hotel? Hilton? Holiday Inn? ICANN proposes to auction this type of domain extension to the highest bidder. Some have suggested that massive lawsuits would be the result of that strategy - cheaper to sue to prevent the auction than to lose to a competitor.

Some Geos have problems, too: who gets .NewYork the city or the state?

The only area where this type of domain is likely to appear anytime soon is for clear trademarks. Ebay, for some reason, has already shown interest. 

ICANN has already burned $10 million studying this and they have, as yet, decided very little. The $100,000 price tag is just an estimate (one of many) and there is, as yet, no procedure in place to consider applications. In short ICANN has no idea whatsoever what it is doing and chaos is to be expected. Consider how they responded to Registerfly, and multiply.

[mandy]

more:

Today, the vast majority of brandholders worldwide are not even aware of the fact that ICANN, the global Internet authority, will be accepting applications in mid-2009 on a first-come-first-served basis -- for a nonrefundable fee of US$185,000 each -- to obtain exclusive global ownership of any root suffix.

Simply put, you may now exclusively own a suffix like .com of your own choice -- like .jobs, .dubai, .hotel, .arabian, .ibm or .sony, .casino -- no one in the world will have that suffix but you, enabling extraordinary control to build global brands and corner markets with far-reaching cyber power, while creating hundreds of your own sub-brands to generate new revenue streams. The overall costs of acquiring exclusive global rights under this platform are highly affordable, compared to the millions wasted in advertising, or fighting trademark and domain battles.

"An international advertising program will commence with ads in major publications explaining the details and procedures," said Paul Levins, executive officer and vice president of corporate affairs for ICANN. "However, the progress to this mega-global movement is at the right speed; with years of thinking and planning behind, it is moving on very solid grounds."...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/ecommerce/65724.html

[accentnepal]

..... of your own choice -- like .jobs, .dubai, .hotel .....

The guy is an "expert" and he doesn't know that there already is a .jobs extension???

Which, like most other recent additions to the namespace, is drifting with very little attention from potential users.

I still think this will not go very far. It is a crass profit grab by ICANN with little practical use, and a lot of people see that.