A proposal to expand the number of top-level domain (TLD) names available to companies has been criticised by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board members voted for the plan earlier this year.
TLDs are the characters at the end of a basic URL such as .com or .org.
If ICANN’s proposal is brought into online marketing practice then almost any word could be used as a TLD, which IAB chief executive and president Randall Rothenberg claimed will upset the “delicate balance of the internet ecosystem”.
The IAB’s worry is that cyber squatters will register domain names in bad faith in an effort to take inflated sums of money from companies.
One new TLD that has built up a great deal of online attention is .XXX, which is due to enter the ‘Sunrise’ phase of development on September 7th 2011, reported XBIZ.
Commenting, Thomas Vollrath, managing director of the UK’s leading domain registrar, 123-reg said: “Despite claims that the introduction of new top-level domains (TLDs) may be a costly and labour intensive exercise, ultimately, we believe it is all about consumer choice. So, if brands want to purchase these TLDs then there is a need for ICANN’s plan to be honoured.
“The idea that ‘cyber squatters’ could extort money by registering domains in ‘bad faith’ does illustrate the need, however, for ICANN to ensure, such as they have with the new .xxx domain extension, that responsible registries are elected . What brands and businesses do need to recognise, as part of the process, is that security is not just limited to the domain itself and as such stringent checks and procedures will need to be reflected in the necessary paperwork before a new TLD can be confirmed,” Vollrath concluded.
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From what I understand, to set up a new TLD you must submit a very lengthly proposal together with a fee of $185,000.
This process will surely prevent most of not all cyber-squatters from registering domains in bad faith.
Surely the danger is not cyber-squatting, but major brands messing it about – .coke, .nike, .apple – etc etc?
The reality is the whole TLD system is a complete waste of energy, and has been so for 20 years. It was created in the 1980’s for the days when there was no standard for DNS resolution and the internet was only used by universities and researchers. There’s no technical need for them at all. If the DNS records existing, the url http://this-is-my-website would work fine. We keep it only because the commercial organisations which have taken over domain name admin want to keep the profits rolling in.