back to article Hundreds of dot-brand domains predicted

Domain name registry operators have predicted that "hundreds" of well-known companies will apply to ICANN to create new "dot-brand" top-level internet domains. But it is still far from clear how many of these potential new domains will turn into thriving, active spaces and how many will be expensive digital wastelands with …

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  1. Ru
    Facepalm

    Yay proliferation

    How many new TLDs have been added since .com was spawned? and how many of them have any real worth or value?

    No-one who isn't either away in investment capital or is a multinational is going to be able to afford to run a vTLD (v for vanity, naturally). Everyone else is still going to want a .com, with .cctld and .co.cctld rather less popular. This whole exercise solves nothing but an ICANN budget shortfall and benefits no-one else.

    1. fattybacon

      It's all about the google

      @Ru Exactly.

      If my dear wife is anything to go by, she's never typed a URL in her life. She goes to google and types the name of the company she's looking for and blindly accepts the first result.

      1. Marty
        Pirate

        It must be the womenn.....

        I am constantly telling the missus not to do this for on-line banking, I have lost count of the amount of times she just googles HSBC and clicks on the top answer (adding a couple more pennies into googles bank account in the process)...

        Maybe she will learn when she logs into her bank account and finds it empty.

  2. BarryP

    How about not having any .

    If other people are like me they will just type coke/microsoft, or whatever they are looking for into the browser bar without any extension and go to the 1st relevant hit. So it does not really matter if the hit is for coke.com or coke.coke I still just type coke with no dot.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      So what happens if…

      … someone calls a machine on the same LAN as yours "microsoft" or "coke"?

      Someone on a private LAN is quite at liberty to call their system whatever they wish. gethostbyname on current OSes won't be able to tell the difference.

      1. Wize

        "So what happens if..."

        Had a similar problem like that at work already.

        I was trying to access an internal webserver and had firefox slapping a www. and a .com round it taking me to someone server out in the big bad world.

        It could be nasty if a popular, say, purchasing program used the same webserver name everywhere by default. Someone registers a typo of that webserver name and just waits for people to hit an almost identical page to their official one. Hard to tell if you are now external or still internal when you enter your bank details.

  3. John Overment

    "Consumers will start looking to the right of the dot."

    They'll only be looking because they'll be completely confused by it. Then when they try it and get to the site they'll forget it entirely.

    I understand that this will be useful because you'll no longer have to have sillymarketingurlstring . com but is this really something to get all that excited about? It just seems like marketing people trying to hype something up that's of minor importance.

  4. Justin Clements

    This could be interesting

    Remember that the first iteration of dns done in Cambridge iirc, was dns backwards, eg com.apple.www. (or uk.co.apple.www). Which for a computer makes far more sense than the system which we use now, which required the trailing dot, eg www.apple.com.

    But if a company gets a top level, lets say "apple", then the UK webserver could easily become uk.apple.

    Which rather suggests we're close to being back where we started when dns was originally proposed in Cambridge.

    1. /dev/null
      Boffin

      Huh?

      By "first iteration of dns", I assume you actually mean the quite different JANET Name Registration Scheme, not RFC 882, though I'm not sure the NRS was invented at Cambridge...

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HELP

    I'm starting fund raising to buy the .isshit top level domain, who's with me?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      first domain:

      icannsrecentdecisiontocreateextratlds.isshit

      Next we should get punctuation - after all, doesn't everybody love commas?

      1. h4rm0ny
        Trollface

        Re: first domain.

        Punctuation is a great idea. I'd love to be able to have some question marks in my URLs, for example.

    2. DAN*tastik
      Mushroom

      Fully agree

      If I had my own neon transformer company, I would stick to my fart.it domain, far(...) better than .fart!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can't see the point.

    Personally, I can't see this working. Companies like to present a unified front. I can't see www.coke.coke or www.twitter.twitter taking off.

    If a company presents a heavily regionalised front, then it might be useful. However, once you've got a TLD then you can sub divide it anyway. I can't actually see much use for this.

    I could be wrong though ... I usually am :-)

    1. kyoukoku
      FAIL

      you fail to see the point that's all

      Errr, why would it be "www.coke.coke" or "www.twitter.twitter"?!

      They'd be more likely to just use www.coke or www.twitter, for example.

      Saying that they wouldn't even need to necessarily continue the convention of using the "www"; they may choose to use something like web.coke, mobile.coke, mail.coke or whatever they want for whatever purpose they choose.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Umm...

        I don't think that just www.coke would work. There would need to be "something" between them.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          FAIL

          Ummm

          Maybe you should make an effort to understand how DNS works before making such a statement?

      2. John I'm only dancing

        or even

        snort.coke, or piss.coke, or my favourite, sh!t.coke

      3. John Miles

        or even

        Coke or twitter as single word will resolve

        1. JJS
          Childcatcher

          Re: or even

          Which is troublesome because I might have machines on my LAN called coke and twitter.

          1. John Miles

            How about machines called “mailserver”

            See - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/04/dotless_domain_security/

            1. Paul 129
              Devil

              better yet

              go for localhost

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Devil

        Aim higher

        Just "coke."

    2. Nigel 11

      Points

      In general I agree, no point. If I don't know a company's domain I don't go guessing, I just type the company name into G^Hmy search engine of chioce. Is there anyone out there who doesn't?

      Some important exceptions exist. Mostly, TLDs that could sell subdomains. myname.twitter, maybe. A few marketplaces restricted by subject (dominated by .xxx, but can imagine .antiques or .pets). More importantly, non-roman alphabets: .china in chinese, .russia in Cyrillic, etc.

      A number of corporations will buy their TLD pronto because their defence against a domain-squatter might be very weak. .apple (it's a fruit), or .bbc (three letters formerly shared by Boston Business Computing, and probably a dozen other organisations in other countries and markets). Only the big guys, though, and they'll probably just set a redirect to their .com site and lose the expense in the "noise" of their IT budgets.

      1. Allan George Dyer
        Paris Hilton

        But internationalised ccTLDs already exist!

        "More importantly, non-roman alphabets: .china in chinese, .russia in Cyrillic, etc."

        I've been using domain names like 網.銳記.公司.香港 for months now... 香港 means Hong Kong

  7. Pen-y-gors
    Thumb Down

    ICANN money-printing machine

    Rubbish! Even if 10,000 global brands go for their own TLD (i.e. $1.85 BILLION for ICANN) then there will still be 10,000,000 or 100,000,000 business websites that are still on .com , .co.uk, .cymru or whatever, so people will NOT forget .com - Joe's Widgets (annual turnover $150,000) is not going to set up website.joeswidgets for $185K!

  8. JDX Gold badge

    so can we have...

    www.apple? apple.apple? crab.apple?

    Seriously though where you use sub-domians like sales.coke.com now it can be sales.coke. But it all sounds rather messy.

  9. lurker

    Not sure what's meant by the subtitle

    "'.com' and '.co.uk' could go the way of 'www.'"

    You mean, remain almost ubiquitous? Sure, you don't _need_ to add the www for most sites nowadays for them to work, but despite that it's almost always included in most marketing etc, and even if you type in 'google.co.uk' or 'theregister.co.uk' you still get directed to the www variants.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      agreed

      www is an instantly recognisable way of saying "what follows is my web address"

      compare www.drink.coke with drink.coke - the latter looks like it could just be a typo

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      The opposite...

      The trend these days is for www.whatever.com to redirect to whatever.com. That www in the URL is just messy. Try it with www.twitter.com (or any other forward thinking web company). Less typing is good.

      1. lurker

        yes but no but

        Hmm, I'd say that since facebook and google, the two 'biggest' sites, work the way I described, rather than the way you described, you could hardly call the matter settled as a result of your twitter example.

        But that's beside the point anyway. What I was saying was that it was nonsensical to state or imply that the era of having 'www' in an address is now history; it clearly isn't, regardless of twitter or other 'forward thinking' web companies.

  10. Fuzz

    pointless, just there to make money

    "They no longer have to look to see what's available in .com," said Hansen. "Everything's available."

    In just the same way as if you own coke.com you can have anything.coke.com

    everybody understands their own country tlds and the main top level ones. I know that if I'm looking for a big brand it will be .com and it's only .com that are going to be able to afford to buy their own tld.

    It just makes a system that's currently easy to guess, "What's Apple's domain name? apple.com" to one where you have multiple posibilities, is it apple.apple apple.com apple. so apple have to think up of every combination and make them all redirect to the correct site. Meanwhile world+dog keep searching for sites on Google and clicking on the links, bypassing any need to know or remember a web address.

  11. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    call me naive...

    but I'm wondering just how many people actually give a damn? Or indeed, how many people go to big-name supplier websites anyway? I mean, if I want a coke, I don't go to coke.com, I go to the supermarket...

    Really, we've gone from IP addresses, though DNS resolution of a name so we don't need to remember the IP address, to search engine dumping so we don't even need the name - I only have to look around an office to see how many people use google to get to default sites.

    Maybe I'm just old and crusty.

  12. frank ly
    Happy

    Ah, dictionaries......

    "Also, if somebody has a brand that is a dictionary word, there's a risk."

    Such as 'coke' or 'apple' perhaps?

    1. stratofish

      The tld is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      along with twitter, oracle, sprite, etc.

      I see this being more useful for mid-level registrars to step in and buy generic TLDs such as .market, .medical, .health, and so on for reselling subdomains.

    2. Leeroy

      and

      Oracle, Sun, Insight, Transcend, Crucial...........

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Meh

    Looks nice but not for most...

    Guess it looks nice for some of the big guys to say 'go to uk.apple' or 'uk.google' but it's just not viable for most small to medium businesses - are they really going to spend over 100k to be www.companyname rather than www.companyname.co.uk

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Domain names replaced by search engines

    Geeks (like us!) still care about, and use that bar at the top for typing in proper domain names. My kids, and I think probably thousands others, just use Google to get to the websites they want. I keep telling them about going directly to the address, but they stick with what they know...

  15. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    But how is this going to scale?

    This issue is being COMPLETELY IGNORED.

    Allowing hundreds (thousands?) of TLDs WILL NOT SCALE. It fundamentally knackers-up the hierarchical nature of DNS and will make zone transfer records HUGE.

    1. Richard Gadsden
      WTF?

      Huh?

      .com has how many million subdomains? Can you imagine the zone transfer of that zone?

      Yet, it seems to manage just fine.

      Sure, this will make the root bigger. But the root name servers are just about the most solid piece of infrastructure that the internet has. They'll cope.

  16. Ian Ferguson
    FAIL

    Pointless

    If Coke stick enjoy.coke on an advert, nobody will realise it's a web address.

    The @ in email addresses and at the start of twitter names identify them as what they are. The www. and/or .com identify web addresses.

    It's hard enough establishing existing TLDs as recognisable addresses, let alone one per brand.

    The whole structure of a URL needs to change, especially in the browser. http:// is also no longer necessary. Taking a leaf from twitter, I'd suggest something like @cocacola would work very well.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Stop

      What! No!

      "The whole structure of a URL needs to change"

      There is no way. There is a reason for the "http:" in the URL, or more precisely, URI:

      http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

      What if you want other things than "http:"?

  17. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    FUD

    To pick just two points from the article:

    "they're very wary of what their competition might do," said Ken Hansen

    Rubbish. Any "competition" who bought the gTLD for someone else's brand name risks being taken to court and they know it. Who's going to splash out several hundred thousand just to provoke a multinational into sending in the lawyers?

    "if the BBC secures .bbc, a company called BBE could find it impossible to acquire .bbe."

    To the extent that that is true, it's true for second level domains as well. In practice, it doesn't seem to be true to any significant extent.

  18. Lockwood

    Always looks odd.

    The Coop went through a pahse of putting their website on their carrier bags.

    www.southern.coop

    It never looked like it should work!

  19. Captain Scarlet Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Hmm

    If it was me I wouldn't have website.mycompany.

    I would be tempted just to use the mycompany bit for the main company website and not bother with the rest except for marketting certain products. My reasoning is I see lots of prople either Google or just type in Facebook and hit enter in the address bar anyway.

  20. Dashworlds

    Hundreds of Dot Brands....As Predicted By ICANN (and other beneficiaries)

    CONGRATULATIONS....Your new Top Level Domain is “.lawyer”

    Now…you might also like to buy:

    .barrister

    .solicitor

    .legal

    .law

    .plead5th

    .notguilty

    .iwasawaythatday.

    .hedidit

    .etc etc etc

  21. Adrian Midgley 1
    Thumb Down

    Wonderfully stupid

    The marketeers are in their element.

    It burns.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Flame

      Oh you wouldn't believe...

      ...just how bloody damn right you are.

      I have to listen to their bollocks regarding these new TLDs etc. >every bloody day<, not long any more and I may just go postal.

      anon, obviously

  22. Pahhh
    Stop

    This breaks the browser single entry boxes

    Recent browser updates will need to be rethought. Now many have merged the URL and Search entry into a single box, how will the browser know if you want to goto the site called "chocolate" or want to do a search on "Chocolate".

    This is annoying already as it sometimes wants to go to a URL when you actually want to search and vice versa.

    It also makes things on intranet or accessing local computers more problematic. If someone has a web server working on their machine, its convinient to use the host name. Yes in the perfert world you should use fully qualified name etc, etc, etc but its just not necessary for small business or home use.

    Lets keep the .com, etc. At least you know that something is a URL then. If you own the domain "fred", you can really communicate on paper that the web site is "fred", so you have to use "http://fred" . At the moment it would be "http://fred.com" but if you put down "fred.com" people would immediately know its a web site.

    Lastly we will open up a massive bidding war on every URL we know of. But of course current domain holders will be fighting to hold their current domains also for the new scheme.

    Crazy state of affairs......

  23. poohbear
    FAIL

    Nuts

    ICANN Is seriously losing the plot. This is akin to The World Postal Council (or whatever its called) allowed Corps to issue their own postage stamps. Imagine the chaos of trying to tie up delivery agreements and revenue sharing worldwide.

  24. Andus McCoatover
    Windows

    "Look to the right of the dot"

    Had this wierd idea that the dot WAS the TLD. But' we don't use it. So, if I look to the 'right of the dot' I see CR/LF.

    So, surely "www.theregister.co.uk." is more correct than ""www.theregister.co.uk"

    Therefore, can I register "www.nokia.epicfail."? Would that work?

  25. david 63

    wot?

    "For example, if the BBC secures .bbc, a company called BBE could find it impossible to acquire .bbe"

    bbe is only 33% like bbc

    have a look at the country code tlds some of these are 50% the same

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Dude

      You need to go back and look at percentages again.

  26. bell
    Happy

    So who is in ...

    ... on a collective to purchase .off?

    Dibs on the .directly.off subdomain!

    1. Kev K
      Thumb Up

      Im in

      If I get .right.off

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    We're not in Kansas any more

    Just go to my new web domains main site, the address is dot but if you type dot.dot or com.dot it should redirect just fine.

    --

    And her little dog too.

  28. Doctor_Wibble
    FAIL

    Easy Solution to this

    This stupidity can't work if all of us running DNS servers refuse to implement it.

    We don't even have to refuse - just state to any insistent powers-that-be that the software won't support it because it is out of spec.

    Not to mention pretty much every FQDN sanity check out there (esp. email) will refuse to accept one of these new TLDs as being valid. Your email sent from your fancy new domain will fail. I don't care how much it cost you.

    Buy one if you like, just don't expect it to work. Nobody outside ICANN has any obligation to support it.

    1. Andus McCoatover
      Windows

      ALL OF US???

      You mean, all thirteen of you? Didn't know there ware so many BOFH's out there.

  29. Alan Brown Silver badge
    FAIL

    The only reason....

    ... that ICANN is able to do (profit) from this is that most people have ignored the alternate roots.

    This may well be the damburst. Those running the root servers are about to find their systems and networks badly swamped.

  30. Lance 3
    FAIL

    FAIL

    "They no longer have to look to see what's available in .com," said Hansen. "Everything's available."

    For a price and now someone will have to remember the suffix as well as the domain. To me that just opens up for others to buy a name that belongs to a competitor.

    "Some companies may even allow their customers to register domains in their dot-brands – imagine yourname.twitter or yourname.facebook, for example."

    They could already do that and would have followed DNS best practices. How about JoeShmoe.twitter.com? That is really how DNS is supposed to be used, not a boatload of domains and soon a shit load of suffixes.

    Take Nike. If they wanted different "sites" for football, baseball, etc. How about football.nike.com and baseball.nike.com? Sure they could buy .nike and have football.nike and baseball.nike.

    DNS is going to take a beating with all these "new" creations.

  31. Pete 8
    Terminator

    so the buns will fly

    when the industry overlapping names all want one.

    eg

    crown pottery

    crown lift trucks

    crown insurance

    crown rental

    the crown 'city of londinium'

    serious diversity FAIL, thinking we all supposed to be the same.

    But they are not.

  32. Timothy Creswick
    Thumb Up

    It makes more sense for email

    I think in general the usefulness of being able to use http://coke/ or "enjoy.coke" is limited, however it sounds like most of these organisations will benefit from lovely concise email addresses: ceo@coke, for example.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's not going to fly...

    ... aside from the fact that applying this is going to make an unholy mess of DNS, it's going to be a complete waste of time.

    The .com is as embedded in people's minds as much as "google it" is for search.

    As someone else pointed out, most people just chuck the company name into the url bar without any suffix and the browser does the rest, either suggesting the suffix, or bringing up page results.

    Other people will just enter company_name and put a .com after it, if that fails, they'll just put the suffix of their own country, e.g. .co.uk

  34. leftfield
    Joke

    Can someone....

    ... loan me a few G's ??? I'm unemployed and my credit score is currently 400... However I wish to register .porn and sell sub-domains... Obviously I'll need the 185k + money to maintain servers which can pass off the 10^999999999999999 A records which will be purchased.

    Obviously I'll need to aggressively defend my IP by registering, .gonzo / .gangbang / .facial (may have to fight nivea for that one)...... you get the picture... Anyone want to club in???

  35. hoffmeister
    FAIL

    filetypes

    What if i register

    .doc

    .pdf

    .txt

    .log

    etc etc etc

  36. hoffmeister

    trust

    I trust hoover.com. , but hoover.net or hoover.biz is a no no for me.

    how in future do i know which domains are the trustworthy ones? do i have to check the DC for every site i visit as typing/pasting the address is no longer a rule which i can follow

  37. XMAN

    confusing for advertising

    Stick enjoy.coke on a sign and people will think nothing of it. Stick coke.com on the same poster and people might visit.

    I guess there are ways around this, like using www.enjoy.coke (looks so odd) or "visit enjoy.coke to find out more" but it's still gonna look a bit odd.

    So they're certainly not gonna wipe .com or .co.uk off the map.

  38. Geoff Heaton

    .xxx

    @leftfield - I wondered if this is taking off because of the decision to allow .xxx to be registered for the porn industry. But I then think like you; .xxx will be too much like .com or .co.uk.

    So will the porn companies now want to ditch .xxx and have, along with your examples, TLDs such as .milf etc etc?

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