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Review of ICANN's New Domain Names
November 16, 2000
The new top level domains (TLDs) are in. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally picked some new domains for people to register, giving people a choice of something other then .com .net and .org. Since this is an important event because it indicates what the future of domain names will be and gives some insight on how they are chosen, you would think that ICANN would pick some real winners with wide-ranging appeal. This doesn't appear to be the case. After looking over the list of 7 new names, I can honestly say that ICANN passed up some very good proposals when they finalized their decision. I've ranked them from best to worst, in my opinion.
.info If there was not a 3 character limit on the original TLDs, I'm sure this one would have been around since the beginning. Something like yellowpages.info would be good for directories of services, or salem.info would be a good site for information about Salem, Oregon. Of course, it means that all the Salems around the world get to fight to be the one salem.info. If they were smart they could set up something like the current .us domain is set up and use city.state.info, so you could have salem.or.info and salem.ma.info. Why not even extend this to other things to make yellowpages.quest.info and yellowpages.att.info, making things less confusing and more organized.
.pro This could be useful as well for establishing a 'professional' image for yourself on the internet, giving web surfers a bit of confidence of your particular skills. I also like the system they have set up to avoid domain squatting and prevent a bunch of people fighting for lawyer.pro or doctor.pro. According to the application, there are set second level names attached to .pro so you can have joesmithlawfirm.law.pro for a law firm and joesmith.doctor.pro for a doctor. Hopefully the registrar will consider expanding to more then the 15 second level names they list on the application, as I'm sure all those professionals out there will think of some more.
.name While it is a step in the right direction for ICANN to devote a TLD for personal websites, .name seems kind of strange. It seems backwards to think of smith.name or jones.name. It looks like they will only let you register a third level name onto an existing domain like smith.name so Joe and Sally Smith can have joe.smith.name and sally.smith.name. I see potential problems for this, because there are a lot of Joe Smith's out there, and odds are that more then just one Joe Smith would want joe.smith.name. If your name is Joe M. Smith, would you really want your website called joem.smith.name or joe.m.smith.name? Something like .per for personal, or .ind for individual makes more sense for this application of a TLD.
.aero Do airliners really need their own TLD? If they were smart, they would have grabbed their .com name or sued whoever was holding it. Sure, we can have delta.aero or aircanada.aero, but who will remember the "aero" part when the general public is more familiar with "dot com" already? The same goes for airports; if I know that I can find Aaron City International Airport at aaroncityairport.com, odds are I'll remember that better then the aaroncityairport.aero. If ICANN had chosen .air, the uses for this TLD would expand into other fields such as cellular telephones, satelites, and wireless networks.
.coop The same argument for .aero goes for the .coop TLD. How many cooperatives out there need something else besides the mycooperative.com name they should already have registered if they are serious about having their presence on the internet? This seems like a way for the registrar to milk money out of companies that will be forced to go register a .coop name to protect their trademark. It's also good for a bit of humor; what if you run a chicken farming cooperative? Are you going to register chicken.coop? That's not something I'd want to promote my business website as.
.museum If ICANN wanted to make something with a wide appeal throughout the internet, why .museum of all choices? Of the hundreds or even thousands of other fields and industries that could use an individual TLD, I think a museum is near the bottom of the list next to those little photo booths in the mall. The .org TLD would cover this perfectly because .org is for nonprofit organizations, which is what museums are. I don't understand why ICANN picked this one, since it seems that the 7 they picked are the ones they felt were the ones needed most. The whole 500 museums that are online might make use of this, but ICANN has shut out so many other good TLDs to make room for this lousy one. Hopefully next time they'll do a little better in choosing new TLDs.
.biz This one has to be the absolute worst. It seems to be a good idea to have a .biz to stand aside .com, but only if you look past the hype the people that will promote .biz will manufacture. This isn't the solution to compete with the .com TLD because every .com business will suddenly realize that .biz will compete with their expensive .com name, and rush out to buy their name or names in .biz, ready to pay any price for it. The corporation that owns 1000 .com names on every possible variation of their product names will be forced to rush out and buy 1000 .biz names, or risk losing their monopoly on the name. It's an easy way for the registrars to make a quick buck off the paranoid dot coms businesses. And when the owner of the big Smith Company who owns smith.com discovers that Joe Smith has started a home-based business and bought smith.biz, guess who will pull out the lawyers and drag poor Joe Smith to court for copyright infringement and have the better chance of winning? Big companies will continue to sue people they feel are using their trademark, and the general public will still think that dot com is the only big thing out there and ignore biz completely, giving it second class status. The only people that will win with .biz are the companies doing the registration.
ICANN really blew it this time when they decided on these 7 TLDs. Hopefully when they decide to add a few more names, they will reconsider some of the other choices they ignored to create these and actually do something for the good of the internet and all it's users.
