The dot-com age is coming to an end. Instead of website addresses ending with those reliable three letters .com, .net or .org, you could be reading this article at thetimes.news or even ilove.sausages.
The US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has approved a plan to increase the number of available generic top-level domains (gTLDs) from 22 to potentially an infinity. But, of course, it will cost you. Icann will charge an organisation $185,000 to buy a new suffix, such as .rollsroyce or .google.
Icann has been slowly dribbling new TLDs to a weary public over the past few years. Recent times have given us .mobi (mobile phones), .eu (something to do with Europe) and .jobs (for fans of Steve) — but have you, as a web user, ever used any of them?
What even is the point of .eu? It’s not as if everyone in Europe speaks the same language and wants the same site for Italy, Germany and France.
Let’s do a quick survey to see which popular brands took up the .eu ending.
Amazon.eu: go to that site and it gives a list of links to .uk, .fr and so on BBC.eu: redirects to the co.uk site Facebook.eu: nothing there YouTube.eu: “Did you mean YouTube.com”?
Google.eu: don’t bother, because they’re not complete numpties at Google HQ.
The rational lesson ought to be that new domain suffixes are an expensive waste of time. After spending oodles of cash on marketing themselves to customers at one address, it seems pointless to then tell people to go in through a different door. But still some organisations will buy these new domain names: that’s because selling additional domain names is a tax on anxiety.
For instance, once .eu was created Microsoft, for example, had a choice: to register Microsoft.eu or to risk a rival company grabbing it. If the company, sufficiently concerned about someone else bagging the website address, buys it, then that’s money in the bank for the authority that looks after .eu.Then imagine this happening not just for one site but every company in existence — that’s a lot of money.
Let’s be nice and say that this process of buying and selling domain suffixes is akin to insurance. But this is insurance against a bad thing happening that can only happen because the insurance company exists. Creating these new endings isn’t an act of God, is it?
Now Icann, instead of wringing the cash out of the game one suffix at a time, is making a hugely greedy swoop for the lot. They are betting on the idea that there are companies out there who are willing to shell out more than £100,000 to own say .news, and they that can create their own mini goldrush by selling on dailybeast.news or dailyplanet.news to more anxious fools. Icann has moved on from setting up lotteries to selling people lotteries that they can run themselves.
One theory is that the bottom must be dropping out of the market — think about how you use the web these days. You either click links off a social site such as Facebook or Twitter. Or you simply type “Coca Cola” into Google and go to the top listed item; the effectiveness of search has devalued the importance of the domain name. It’s unlikely that you pay a great deal of attention to the URL — or care whether a site is dot com, dot co.uk or even dot bonkersconkers.
But who are Icann and who made them the boss of these matters? When the internet was in its infancy and an offshoot of the US military, the US Government used to control who could register what on it. But in 1998 these powers were handed over to Icann, a “non-profit organisation”.
Icann has no competition: it is the sole controller of who registers which gTLD, and it is using this monopoly to gouge money out of businesses’ fear of cyber squatting.
Nice work if you can get it, or maybe just one big dot-con?
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