As much as the ongoing Yahoo-Microsoft soap opera and Microsoft’s apparent acquisition of Powerset are dominating the headlines, a particularly fascinating development is ICANN’s decision to radically liberalize the “top-level” domain structure.
Since the Web emerged as a mainstream vehicle, there’s been a lot of back and forth about who controls the domain landscape, and which domain would rule the roost. While .com became the must-have domain, demand for alternatives has been more than evident given the interest alternative domains such as in .tv and it – the domestic domains of Tuvulu and Italy respectively.
Now, there will be no lack of domains. There could be generic domains such as .football or .work or .fun; corporate domains such as .microsoft or .google; regional domains such as .asia or .sudamerica; or even vanity domains – .techcrunch or .arrington, anyone?
Who knows, maybe there will be a .mark domain. Then, I could register www.mark.mark.
4 Comments
I think this was a much needed change, particularly with the difficulty in obtaining a memorable domain. Hopefully this will provide much more scope.
I did alse read somewhere that these domains could cost thousands of dollars to create though. Obviously that would not be cool and would severely hamper the proliferation of them.
> Who knows, maybe there will be a .mark domain. Then, I could register http://www.mark.mark.
As long as I can have .marc.marc then.
If .info and .biz never caught on, why would these?
What would cost thousands of dollars is to register all the variations of you existing domain, so nobody can infringe on your trademark.
What is interesting is how google is going to index these websites. Right now it gives more importance to .com domains over .info or .biz and that is why they never caught on. Needless to say that finding something via search engine system becomes more difficult every day, so the creation of millions of new domains won’t make it any easier.
This move is just a way for domain registrars to grow their business even more.
As a web entrepreneur I am not really fond of the change. I am wondering if could pre-register domain before the start of new program in 2009.