Summer 2011: The changing face of the Internet
 

.nxt | A Conference About New Internet Extensions

So, as you can see, the Internet is about to undergo what's probably its biggest shift since the advent of Google and social media.

In a nutshell: there are currently 21 top-level domain on the Internet (e.g. .com, .net, .org, .edu, .ca). This summer, it will be possible to fork over $185,000 to register your very own (e.g. .baraka, .tfp, .chocolatemilkshake).

This will change how the Internet will be organized.

You can imaging branding, such as .facebook, .apple, etc., which means you will have an entire domain of websites under brand names that are organized by the companies who own them. You can also imagine communities such as .gay, .green, etc., that will welcome members and their websites for like-minded people.

But how will this pan out? Will it be a transformation, or merely a shift?

Are there concerns? How does net neutrality factor in? Does the price tag go against the idea of an open and free Internet?

I mean, wow... am I overreacting or is this pretty crazy?

Have a look at the groups who have gone public already with their intent to register their own top-level domains:
Applicants for new gTLDs | .nxt

As soon as next year, we will see these rolling out online.

What do you think? If it's not broke, don't fix it? Are corporations essentially taking over the Internet? Is this an unnecessary abstraction? Is it a necessary expansion?

It sounds a bit annoying, but I don't see it as a seismic shift or anything. It will just make it more necessary for people to use a search engine to get somewhere (was it itunes.apple.com, or just itunes.apple? Screw it, I'll ask Google).

For big businesses, will they have to squat on walmart.sucks, walmart.blows, etc.?

Small correction -- there are 21 gTLD's, not 21 TLD's altogether. Things like .us, .ca or .uk are ccTLD's (country code TLD's) -- as you might imagine, there's one for each country. Since there are 248 countries, that makes for 269 altogether.

Of course, that doesn't even begin to paint the full picture. Of the gTLD's, a number are restricted; .edu, .mil and .gov are some examples. Then there are others like .tel that just never really caught on. And if that's not enough, several of the ccTLD's have been genericized, meaning that they can be registered by anyone -- .tv, .fm and .co are some examples of those.

In short, I really don't see this as being much of anything at all. I think it's possible we'll see a few vanity TLD's (.facebook or .fb is a remarkably strong possibility, by my reckoning) but I don't see very many companies being willing to manage the infrastructure necessary to run their own TLD. The reality is that the $185 000 to ICANN is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of running the servers necessary and unless you can hit on something with the basic draw of one of the 'big three' or similar, you'll probably never see enough in registration fees to cover the cost.

.tel is interesting as the test case (side note: your second article is about two years out of date). There really were all these terribly optimistic predictions about landrush registrations. Reality: I've seen a grand total of one .tel in use, and I work directly with this stuff to earn my Doritos.

Short version? Whole thing's a non-starter.

You want to know where the real show is going on, read up on the transition to IPv6. We've all been caught with our pants down, and collectively as an industry we have absolutely no excuse for it.

There's going to be some serious tapdancing on that one before year's end.

As I see it, it is more that this will become a tool in the branding toolbox.

Do people still type in the full website? I just use the Awesome Bar and type in "face" and up comes facebook. If I don't do that, I use google and click.

It will be interesting to see if companies are willing to pony up the cash to prevent Apple.sucks. The person who owns .sucks should be able to push for blackmail money from all the big corporations. ;)

I imagine that ICANN will require UDRP policies in place to prevent that kind of stuff.

As of right now, if you have a registered mark (and possibly meet some other requirements, like presence) you can file a dispute with ICANN to push people off your domain. Just like I couldn't go register apple.com even if it did become available -- it's a registered mark of Apple Inc, so they could file a dispute to get it back. Unless I can prove an equal claim it's an open and shut case.

But .sucks is not a trademark of Walmart. As I understand it, when you buy one of these new domains (like .apple) you own the whole domain.

For example, when you currently buy apple.com, you control only apple.com and not any of the other .com addresses. In this case, if you purchase .sucks, you can create any number of variations on .sucks. That's why it costs US$185,000 rather than the low price for which you can currently license a _____.com.

At least that's the way I'm reading it.

That said, there may be provisions in your purchase agreement to prevent you from using trademarked names unless they held by the copyright/trademark holder.

tell me more about this "Awesome Bar" thing...

The address bar in Firefox is sometimes called the "awesome bar" because it is fairly intuitive.

oh! well I'm using firefox at this moment...

---------- Post added at 12:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:25 PM ----------

wow. awesome....

I feel like it's a push and pull. We need more businesses using the internet to keep it growing/innovating and to finally start pushing through faster broadband. The problem is that big business on the internet is that they love to fight dirty for profits and regular users like us can end up getting screwed.

This change looks like a step in the business direction of the internet's evolution. While it can come with positives, it's clearly going to come with negatives. We need more movement on the internet's social evolution particularly in a development of civil rights for the internet protected by national laws. Net neutrality is a really, really good place to start, and this development seems like a good opportunity to remind people that we need more support on NN in order to prevent negative changes.

You're misunderstanding the difference between a second level domain and a TLD. I don't think it's necessary to bore everyone with the technical aspects, but suffice to say that in order to register a TLD you need to work directly with ICANN, which means you have to play by their rules. So, while it's true that you could (for example) create a website with the address applesucks.tfproject.org and nobody would really have much call to tell you different, doing things like registering apple.sucks would likely land afoul of established registy policies -- whoever created the .sucks TLD would have to meet ICANN's requirements or they wouldn't be able to create in the first place, and it's highly likely that ICANN will require something in place akin to the UDRP.

See, this is why the whole thing is a non-starter, in my opinion. Registering a domain in the existing namespace is practically zero-cost -- $10 or $20, fill out a form or two, and you're done. Opening up a new TLD is different. Apart from the $185 000 filing fee you're going to have to invest in thousands or maybe millions in infrastructure and staffing, and you'll need to establish all new policies and procedures. I can't see there being a lot of demand for new TLD's, and not nearly enough to justify the investment it's going to take to create one.

History bears it out. When was the last time you saw a .aero domain?

Sounds like a step back to me... can anyone say "newsgroups"?

why dont we just throw out www. for alt.binaries while we're at it?