New Top Level Domains Set to Be Revealed

Enterprise Networking Planet ^ | 8 June 2012 | Sean Michael Kerner

[ShadowAce]

On June 13th, ICANN will for the first time publicly reveal the new names that could one day become Top Level Domains. It's a process that will yield thousands of new Generic Top Level Domains to the Internet. Currently there are only 22 TLDs, including the well known .com,.net and .org.

The process that kicked off the new gTLDs was approved a year agoafter vigorous debate. While ICANN is not publicly revealing the names that have been applied for until June 13th, there has been some preliminary disclosure from a number of the applicants.

One of the many groups applying for new gTLDs is Donuts Inc. While the name might sound whimsical, Donuts Inc is a serious business and has raised $100 million in venture capital to fund its gTLD efforts. With that money in hand, Donuts has applied for 307 gTLDs in total. As to how Donuts went about selecting the 307 domains, Mason Cole, VP Communication at Donuts told InternetNewsthat they had a pretty rigorous process that was some art and some science.

"We evaluated about 3,000 potential TLDs and using a lot of analytics and research, narrowed it to 307," Cole said.

Donuts is not however yet disclosing the list of names that they applied for. Google on the other hand is also applying for new gTLDs and they have publicly disclosed what some of those names are.

Google has applied for names related to their business including the .google and .youtube domain. As well they have applied for at least one whimsical name, with .lol.

"We're just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment," Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google wrote in a blog post. "By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverse—and perhaps shorter—signposts in cyberspace."

One of the things that is likely to happen on June 13th is that the name reveal will disclose contention for certain names. That is, more than one group will be applying for the same name string. Donuts' Mason said that name contention is certain to happen.

"That will be known as a 'contention set,' and ICANN will encourage applicants to resolve the contention among themselves and, failing that, ICANN will conduct an auction to find a prevailing applicant," Mason said. "It's too early to say what Donuts will do specifically, but we resourced the company so that we are capable of securing each TLD we applied for."

While there is lots of money being thrown at the creation of new TLDs, what's not entirely clear is whether or not Internet users will use them. The Internet today has 22 TLDs and yet .com still represents the lion's share, with others still struggling to gain prominence.

Mason noted that .COM has over 100 million registrations, which is a lot of names.

"The downside is if you want a domain name specific to what you're doing -- your business, product, family, cause, project, whatever -- you're really unlikely to find it," Mason said. " These TLDs will be different because they allow variety and specificity."

For example, Mason said, would a company rather have getyournyctheatertickets.com, or theater.tickets?

Mason added that as well, with the new TLDs companies will be attracting new users to the Internet who can't use it in a meaningful way now because they can't type in their native characters (like Cyrillic for Russian or Kanji for Japanese). According to Mason, some of the new TLDs will solve that issue.

"If you measure by utility, specificity, new options, your success rate just went up," Mason said.

[ShadowAce]

[Carriage Hill]

_...

[chrisser]

Mason noted that .COM has over 100 million registrations, which is a lot of names.

"The downside is if you want a domain name specific to what you're doing -- your business, product, family, cause, project, whatever -- you're really unlikely to find it," Mason said. " These TLDs will be different because they allow variety and specificity."

How many of those registrations are actually used? For better or worse, the current domain model allows speculators to buy up huge blocks of domain names purely so they can auction them off later. The same thing will happen with any new TLDs that are added.

Of course, most businesses starting out don't have the cash to pay for these useful names that are taken off the table, so they have to come up with more and more esoteric and convoluted names while the useful names go unused.

I don't know what the solution is, but creating more blocks of names that are just going to be bought up and removed from circulation anyway, doesn't seem to be a big help.

[Tanniker Smith]

There should be a domain for the people of Middle Earth, *.ent.
They'll get lots of traffic from people like me who mistype .net all the time.

[dayglored]

IMO, this is nothing but a scam. While well-intentioned (perhaps), what this REALLY means is that thousands of companies now have to purchase and maintain hundreds more domains of the form my_company.every_new_tld simply to keep a competitor from doing so. The income from this maneuver enriches the registrars, which is why they have supported it.

It is nothing but thinly veiled extortion, with an excuse that satisfies the masses who don't have any knowledge of why TLDs existed in the first place.

*SIGH*

[muir_redwoods]

ICANN’s monopoly is at risk and they may lose it by August this year. The “invitation” to spend between $100K and a million to protect your brand from squatters is largely seen as a last minute fund raising effort by ICANN. This mostly means nothing.

[Hotlanta Mike]

Barry Soetoro

Home - by BigFurHat - June 11, 2012 - 07:30 America/New_York - 7 Comments

Have you ever typed in BarrySoetoro.com just to see what happens?

Try it.

http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=137195

[Paine in the Neck]

These top level domains are a racket. Suppose you have company MyCompany. You want a website so you acquire MyCompany.com. Immediately, you are confronted with MyCompany.net, MyCompany.tv, etc, etc, as potential harmers of your reputation. To protect yourself you must acquire all these other sites as well. Besides multiplying the revenues of the organizations controlling the top level domains by the number of newly created domains, it is sometimes a lengthy and expensive proposition to collect all the MyCompany URLs accross the ever-expanding set of domains. There must be a better way to organize internet domains that is more in the interests of the users than in the interests of the controllers.

[zeugma]

IMO, this is nothing but a scam. While well-intentioned (perhaps), what this REALLY means is that thousands of companies now have to purchase and maintain hundreds more domains of the form my_company.every_new_tld simply to keep a competitor from doing so. The income from this maneuver enriches the registrars, which is why they have supported it.

Exactly. TLDs for countries make sense.

.com was to initially proposeds as an avenue for commercial domains, because back in the day, commerce on the net was a bid no-no. .biz is a stupid TLD, that is all ready covered by .com.

.net was origionally supposed to be for ISPs, and similar network infrastructure.

.org was for non-profits

.info - I don't know what the heck this is for.

.edu - for educational institutions

.gov - for use by the u.s. government

.mil - for use by u.s. military. I don't know why they couldn't just use .gov.

.arpa - used for reverse dns lookups

About the only extension to the original domain list that I can see a real purpose for is .xxx, so they can have their own ghetto.

the other current ones are just a waste of money (.aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .int, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .pro, .tel, .travel). They just exist to extort money out of folks.

[dayglored]

> .info - I don't know what the heck this is for.

Reference material? I dunno either.

> (.aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .int,...

LOL. I initially scanned that as ".cat .poop" which if you knew my cats' opinion of the interwebs, would be apropos.