Daily Domain Name Registration Blog

We’ve known that ICANN was serious about introducing new gTLDs for quite a while, and now it seems we’re a step closer to seeing those new domains going online. There are a few issues here worth discussing.

ICANN’s all about public input at the moment (as with recent domain tasting discussions), so I’ll be interested to see to what extent public opinion is taken into account with the new gTLDs.

As many have commented of late, ICANN seems to be suffering from scope creep, to the detriment of neutrality. Is it really an unelected body’s business to make decisions which could end up having serious moral, social and economic implications (as it did with the .xxx domain)? On what grounds will ICANN choose to accept or reject gTLD proposals? I feel as if it should be a UN body, or something of that sort, that deals with these issues, rather than an unbelievably complicated organisation which consists entirely of hard-to-please committees and a healthy dose of bureaucracy, and which can’t be said to represent the views of more than a relatively small proportion of internet users. ICANN may welcome public input, but it’s hard to see how those who aren’t English speakers could possibly participate.

I’m also not sure how useful the new gTLDs will be. Yes, a quite a lot of .info and .biz domains have been registered, but it’s a sad fact that a considerable proportion of those domains are being used for disreputable purposes, or else they’ve been snapped up by speculators or businesses looking to protect a brand. How many legitimate .biz domains have you seen, and how seriously do you take an online business which uses that TLD? In my opinion, part of the problem is that it is precisely because good .com domains are hard to come by that they have such credibility as far as the general public is concerned. If your website has a good five or six letter .com domain name, it stamps your initiative with an impression of business acumen and sound financial support. The same simply cannot be said for .biz or .info, and I fear that the same problem will abound with any new gTLDs.

In theory, I’m all for the narrowing of the digital divide with the introduction of internationalised gTLDs using non-Latin characters (something which ICANN seems to be strongly hinting at). I do think that the implications for fraud are somewhat disturbing:

A significant problem lies in the fact that many characters from different languages look very similar. Although this could frustrate users who end up an entirely different website to the one whose address they thought they had typed, a more serious concern is the potential for fraud and phishing. PC Pro, 22nd Nov 2006

However, ICANN will probably come up with something clever to get around people registering paypal.blah with Cyrillic a’s. Along with internationalised domains, I think there could also be some value in more reliably restricted domains. .coop and .museum are reasonably trustworthy at the moment; it’s a shame that .pro has been abused in recent years by unscrupulous registrars, but nevertheless, you can still be pretty sure that a .law.pro domain is really that of a law-related organisation. I think this kind of thing is useful, given the proliferation of fraudulent and fly-by-night websites out there, and I’d like to see more of the same.

Another possible benefit for domain registrants is that there’ll be more competition between domain registries, which can only be a good thing. I guess there may also be potential for some neat domain hacks ^_^