Brave New gTLDs?

Oh brave new world of new gTLDs - a view perhaps not shared by everyone. The Guardian today reports of a new study which reveals that 65% of the British population (or 65% of the 1000 British consumers asked by the Future Laboratory and Gandi.net who conducted the study) believe that the introduction of new generic top level domains (gTLDs) could turn the internet into rather messy and chaotic place and also raise ownership conflicts.

Image from awwthatscute.com

According to the Guardian, the report gives numerous examples of gTLD's that could offend, such as the gTLD ".god" and ".war" and also predicts that there could be conflicts ahead depending on the respective use of the new gTLDs. ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, introduced its plans concerning new gTLD's last October (see here on the ICANN's website).

".ipkat" anyone?
Brave New gTLDs? Brave New gTLDs? Reviewed by Birgit Clark on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 Rating: 5

5 comments:

  1. More gTLDs always were a daft idea. ICANN should not be in charge either!

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  2. If anything this will decrease the usefulness of domain names and increase the use of search engines.

    But it will certainly also fill the pockets of ICANN. In the test-run of the gTLDs (.info, .biz and others) most of the registrations were of a defensive nature (i.e. of companies seeing themselves forced to reigister domain names containing their trademarks having to go through a bidding process).

    Oh yes, and it will certianly increase lawsuits and cause new dispute settlement bodies to emerge (which in the past have not alsways rendered decisions of the the highest quality). IMO disputes will not so much entail (religiously) offensive gTLDs, but rather those the end in .london or .berlin.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What to think of gTLD's and registred trademarks? Would for example Heineken be pleased with this: www.dontdrink.heineken?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I definitely agree with the first part of that.

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  5. I went to INTA a few years ago where this was discussed, and there were concerns about the likely increase in warehousing/cybersquatting.

    The response was that there was a lot of demand for extra domains from the users.

    However, later on it became clear that the primary users from which the demand originated were the warehousers themselves!

    So in my view such uncontrolled extension can hardly be in the real public interest (i.e. not disproportionately including warehousers), especially when it costs at least ten times more to defend a domain than to buy one in the first place. It will lead to a lot of pain and confusion.

    All I can say further is how about www.icann.AreABunchOfNumptys ?

    ReplyDelete

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