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A new era for domain name endings
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TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: For years, other countries have resented America's lead role in overseeing the Internet. Well today, there's a new regime in effect. It puts U.S. and foreign representatives in charge. As Ashley Milne-Tyte reports, that has implications for those expensive domain names.
Ashley Milne-Tyte: The U.S. works with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. That's a mouthful for ICANN, the Internet's governing body. Now, more foreign representatives will help run the Internet.
ICANN assigns domain names and it's decided to make more endings available beyond just dot-com, dot-net, and dot-biz. Milton Mueller of Syracuse University says U.S. companies lobbied against that.
Milton Mueller: ICANN's decision was kind of thrown into the U.S. political system, where large businesses with brands to protect objected strongly.
But foreign representatives favor broadening the selection. It could lead to all sort of dots, like dot-booze, dot-food or even dot-I-CANN!
Still, U.S. businesses say domain names similar to theirs could force them to pay as much as $100,000 a pop to buy out cybersquatters.
In New York, I'm Ashley Milne-Tyte for Marketplace -- and Marketplace.org.
Too bad for the corp. whiners...all it takes is a trademark and they can register a dispute and get the cyber-squatted domain for free. I should know; I did just this for the small video rental chain I worked for about five years ago.
As is oh so typical, big biz is way out of touch with reality and just doesn't get it (and they probably wasted shareholder $ and bought a .biz domain too). As if they had anything to do with the Internet in the first place. Who asked them anyway!?
Considering how many internet domain names linked to valid organizations that have been "pirated" and held by "extortionists" that did not ever intend to use them, I would hope that ICANN does not allow a run on new dot suffixes by those wishing to "extort" further "fees" to release domain names obviously pertaining to valid groups or,as a goodwill gesture, contact groups holding similar names or acronyms using existing dot suffixes and offer the newly created net addresses to them.
The new extensions after the DOT will also include non-latin characters. For example, by the end of this year Russia will have access to .рф (russian federation) extension. This is opening up a whole new world of language to the internet. Smart investors will start now, investing in Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) while there are just a few short months before the boom hits, you can still purchase some good IDNs ending in .com or .net for pretty good prices. By November 2009, the value of IDNs is expecting to increase and perhaps increase 10-fold by mid-2010. I think it is a good sound investment.
