ICANN Decides To Expand Internet - More Domains

The current system of registering top level domains involves categorizing them into a particular type of organization. For example, .com is for commercial organizations, .info is for informational sites, and .aero is for the air transport industry. I mentioned earlier that there would no longer be strict rules administering the registration of TLDs. Just to be clear, the term "strict" really only refers to the fact that there are specific TLDs you are allowed to use, not how you use them.

It turns out that ICANN has deemed several TLDs unrestricted as far as who can use them, including .com, .net, and .org. This meant people could start registering domains originally meant for non-profit organizations to compete with for-profit businesses using .com. This forced the owners of a .com domain to purchase as many domains as they possibly could (sometimes from people who bought the TLD equivalent just to sell to the .com owner) in order to protect their brand name. And with the addition of country TLDs, the annual expense of one domain owner can be up to hundreds of dollars. The Polynesian island of Tuvalu, for example, has leased the .tv domain to several television companies.

So how does this relate to ICANN's decision to allow the registration of just about any TLD? Well, one obvious repercussion would be that the average domain owner would have to compete with an almost limitless amount of related domains. “It will be expensive and pointless,” says Graham Hales of Interbrand. “It will be a big problem for companies as they will have to buy up lots of domains to cover themselves.”

Let's say you have a website called petnames.com that specializes in naming people's pets. Well now, any domain name can be registered and appended to 'petnames.' So someone searching for petnames.com might accidentally stumble across petnames.cats, petnames.dogs, petnames.hamsters, petnames.best, etc. This could be disastrous if people have no better way of differentiating one site from another, especially if we leave brand names at the mercy of the search engine.

But ICANN says they will introduce these new changes slowly. There are already guidelines that each applicant must go through and objections can be raised on grounds ranging from trademark conflicts to racism. And because the price to register a domain will most likely start in the low six-figures, only those with serious aspirations should be able to take part, hopefully assuaging any concerns about spamming and cybersquatting. Of course, the trademark restrictions only apply to the TLD, not the overall site name.

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