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DOMAIN NAMES


MEASURING SUCCESS IN THE NEW INTERNET DOMAINS


The new gTLDs have fi nally arrived, promising an era of innovation for the Internet’s global addressing system. The measure of success for this tectonic shift will lie not in raw numbers, but in how it improves the Internet experience for users, says Bob Samuelson.


T e process of bringing the new generic top- level domain (gTLD) programme from concept to reality has been years in the making. While the body that oversees the Internet’s addressing system, ICANN, began approving new gTLDs in 2013, it wasn’t until January 2014 that ordinary Internet users got the opportunity to register addresses in them.


At the time of writing, only a fraction of the many hundreds of TLDs slated for introduction have opened their doors to the public, but even that very small sample has triggered an outpouring of interest and activity in the global Internet community.


At the end of February, Donuts Inc—the largest single applicant for new gTLDs—had made 29 domains available to the public in what the domain name industry calls ‘general availability’. Some of the earliest available domains include .bike, .guru,


.land and .clothing. In just over


a month of general availability for those 29 domains, Internet users around the world have registered more than 200,000 addresses under them, and the number is growing fast.


While registration statistics are interesting— and important for companies in the new gTLD industry—they don’t tell the whole story of how new gTLDs are changing the Internet addressing landscape.


For more than a decade, Internet addressing has been a numbers game. With all the major domains long


divorced from their original


meanings (‘commercial’ for .com, ‘network’ for .net, ‘organisation’ for .org), the most desirable domain was simply the one with the most addresses. Absent any intrinsic meaning, it’s not hard to see how most registrants simply gravitated toward the biggest domain—.com— creating a virtuous cycle for it.


When ICANN fi rst experimented with adding new gTLDs in 2000, the batch of seven new names was too small to meaningfully impact that dynamic. T e two most successful from


www.worldipreview.com


One of the selling points of new gTLDs has always been that they will alleviate artifi cial scarcity in TLDs such as .com, where attractive addresses are either long gone or priced way out of reach on the aſt ermarket. And while that certainly is an aspect of the value of new gTLDs, it isn’t what’s new about this programme.


T e real value this time around lies in the ability of registrants to build highly specifi c online brands around names that are targeted specifi cally to their businesses, interests and localities.


Trademarks & Brands Online Volume 3, Issue 1 31


that round, .biz and .info, were broad generic terms with little diff erentiation from the market- leading .com and .net.


But this programme is profoundly diff erent. By the time it is completed, more than 1,000 new TLDs will be added to the Internet’s addressing system, representing a wide range of interests, sectors, hobbies, industries, languages, brands and localities.


In 2000, the question was “what will be the next .com?” Today the question is “how will new TLDs change the way Internet addressing looks in the next fi ve to 10 years?” And while it’s not possible to answer that question just a few months into the availability of new TLDs, early indications paint an interesting picture of what could be coming.


Unique identifi ers


Maki.guru is a food truck that sells sushi to order in Vienna, Austria. One of the seven TLDs included in Donuts’s fi rst general availability batch, .guru opened to the public on January 29, 2014, and already is a cornerstone of this truck’s online and real-world identity.


From one look at the website it’s clear that maki. guru isn’t just a web address—it’s baked into the company’s corporate identity. In this case .guru isn’t just a necessary aſt erthought at the end of the company’s ‘real’ name—it’s an identifi er that speaks to the sushi maker’s mastery of its craſt .


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