June 27, 2008
Last week ICANN approved a massive change to the Internet's address system. Companies, organizations and countries can now apply for domain names that end in pretty much anything. www.fastcompany.com could become www.fastcompany.magazine and www.parishilton.com could become www.parishilton.paris. Right now, domain names are restricted to about 20 suffixes -- .com (for companies), .org (for organizations) and identifying labels for countries like .uk.
If several parties want one name — for instance .grocery — an auction will be held to settle the dispute.
The note has raised grave doubts, with people worrying that it will create confusion – the wide array of possible addresses could be hard to remember – and also encourage cyber squatters, who buy and sell domain names solely to make a profit.
"It could also sow confusion in the minds of Web users, create a host of new ways to exploit the Web addressing system and start a wave of legal skirmishes over applications to register trademarks — .coke, for example," write Brad Stone and Doreen Carvajal of The New York Times.
Another big, less controversial, vote passed was approving domain names to be registered in different scripts, like Chinese and Hindi.
Comments | 6 Total
June 30, 2008 at 2:47pm by Brendan Collins
I really can't see how this wouldn't sow mass confusion and create anything but headaches for a lot of people. How much are companies like Coke and Pepsi willing to pay in an auction for .cola? What about .gas? Is ExxonMobil gonna shell out (pun clearly intended) a MASSIVE amount for that one? The gloves will come off quick, that's for sure.
June 30, 2008 at 3:28pm by Michael Krakovskiy
It will be the best thing to happen to cybersquatters since $5 domains at Godaddy.
June 30, 2008 at 6:29pm by Jason Tagg
How confusing would it be if you could use regional spellings - color/colour
July 2, 2008 at 11:54am by Carel Two-Eagle
I don't see that domains ending in "almost" any word would cause confusion - there being some, like the Carlin 7 "forbidden" ones - that wouldn't make it past whatever censors (would?) exist.. BUT in any language? How many languages are there in the world - not mentioning dialects? I believe that would make for mass confusion. We don't need a lot of structure, but we do need some, and I think allowing any language would result in that. Some languages, such as my own native one, need diacritical marks for appropriate pronunciation - without them, it's nearly impossible to get correct pronunciation and risking saying something rude is almost guaranteed, which could easily put people off rather than bring them to a company or product. There are many like that. We might go with "dot-any word", but we need to stick to the language we started the Internet with for the language.
July 6, 2008 at 9:54am by Theo van der zee
Don't overlook the fact that local characters will be allowed aswell. For most of those chars, I do not even know how to get them on my screen using the keyboard. Will I not be able to visit those websites then?
July 6, 2008 at 2:04pm by Bryan Coe
I think the "any ending" will cause more problems than any language. It wouldn't be very smart for a business to choose something with local characters that other languages don't use if they want to market to anyone outside the region that speaks that language/dialect. I see the free for all ending as more detrimental because it is sort of equivalent to saying there are no longer any area codes or country codes for telephone numbers. Plus, who is going to benefit from the bidding wars? It won't be ICANN, it will be the registrars and the domain squatters.