NetHosted Blog

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have announced that it will be possible to apply for your own domain extension if you have suitable justification, most likely these will be the reserve of big corporations and cities. This is down in part to the $185,000 application fee attached, don’t be surprised if you find .apple, .coke and .london being picked up by their respective companies and councils.

The likely window to apply for these will be limited, currently it looks like it will open in January 2012 for 90 days before closing potentially for years. Currently there are only 22 generic top level domains (gTLDs) such as .net, .com with around 250 country specific TLDs such as .uk, .se, etc. so this is likely to at least double the total available domain extensions if not triple or more, and for the first time TLDs will be controlled by businesses and potentially individuals. This makes policing them a much more daunting task for ICANN, and though they will no doubt be well regulated they will need to devote a lot more resources to this task than previously.

As far as web-site owners go this won’t affect the vast majority, these new TLDs will be out of reach for most due to pricing and red tape, however it will be interesting to see if some of these new TLD owners open these up to either public purchase or public usage. This could be done for instance in the case of apple who offer customers mac.com email addresses, they could instead with this offer @users.apple addresses and perhaps websites/blogs etc. too, darryl.users.apple for instance.

The search engine effects of these will be interesting to watch too, with Google having to pickup these new TLDs. They will no doubt be tweaking their algorithms now to take these into account, the fact that new gTLDs will be expensive and difficult to get would mean that they justify a higher base authority starting point, but if this were granted they would become a prime target for hackers and crackers to try and take advantage of. If access were gained for people to unscrupulously create new domains as a registrar and then exploit these en-masse this could lead to search engine chaos if these are at inception assigned some weight in the search engine’s eyes; perhaps this is not viable and they would start at a zero baseline.

It will no doubt be interesting to follow this as it unfolds and to see what this means for existing TLDs, perhaps the days of domains selling for millions of dollars are over, we may not see another sex.com $12,000,000 deal if gTLDs are available for a fraction of that price.