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Codebreaker

Commerce Department tries to stop big domain expansion

John Moe Jan 5, 2012


If you’re a Republican presidential contender, Tuesday is all about the New Hampshire primary. Those concerned with domain names have a wholly different concern. Tuesday’s the day of the huge new domain name expansion where organizations can apply to be the owners of new domain names with just about anything after the dot. So instead of .com or .org, you can have .chocolate or.hats or .monkey or .yougettheidea.

The Commerce Department is the latest to urge the delay of this rollout because of the concerns of businesses. There’s just a lot of concern over whether a business will be compelled to buy up the website in every domain someone starts (would we need to shell out money for marketplace.monkey?). There’s also the issue of whether if you’re Coca-Cola, you need to buy up the whole domains of .coke and .dietcoke and .cocacola. People are confused and so Commerce is joining congressional subcommittees that have already asked for delays.

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