Date: Thursday, August 2, 2007
Is there life after dot com?
From next year the age of all websites ending with .com could be a thing of the past with the internet being opened up for application for a potentially limitless number of suffixes.
The top level (the bit that comes after the dot) is being liberalised by the company in charge of naming websites, ICANN, which will allow people to apply for any name they want as part of their domain suffix. This could mean that within the next year websites such as www.latest.google and www.whatson.manchester could be appearing on our screens. However the company has been in long talks as to how best to monitor the names people will apply for in order to stop suffixes such as .nazi and .nigger appearing online. One potential way is the $100,000 application fees people will be required to pay, as well as the requirement that applicants will have to prove they are capable of running a substantial piece of the cyberspace network. There are currently 60 million dotcoms floating about on the net, and only 271 other suffixes existing worldwide, of which most are representative of the country they are based in, such as .co.uk or .es. With these new developments the potential amount of suffixes is endless.
There already exist some top level domains (TLD), but these are relatively few in number due to people’s lack of knowledge about their existence. This could all be set to change thanks to ICANN’s new campaign to open up the internet to the masses. Experts welcome this development saying that it will create more competition in the online market which is always a good thing, but that this alone is not enough. They say that people must offer something individual with their sites besides a unique name. However the chance to see your own name as a domain on the internet may be enough of an incentive for consumers to buy in to the TLD innovation.
Source:
Guardian
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