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The Next Big Thing On The Net

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on June 20, 2011.

06-20-2011 by Linda S. Carbonell

Okay, our techie has left the building. You’re stuck with me, the resident luddite.

During the 2004 campaign, Dick Cheney mistakenly sent people to a dot com instead of a dot net, with hilarious results. We have recently learned how many websites route through Libya because of its domain suffix. Things in the domain world are about to get even more error-prone and confusing for men like Dubya who thinks that web addresses begin with “w.”

There are over 300 domain suffixes available, but very few are available for general use. Dot com, dot org, dot gov and dot net are the most common for Americans, then there are all the country suffixes like dot uk and dot ca (Canada, not California). Now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which handles these things, will be registering addresses ending in just about anything. Banks can use websites that end dot bank, bloggers could use dot blog, that kind of thing. Websites can use their domain suffix to identify what they are. Let the confusion begin.

This could get really interesting. Will dot ins go to insurance or institutes? Will dot med be medicine or media? This could go on for paragraphs, but you get the idea. Then there’s the matter of Apple itself. Among the proposals is a suffix for iPods, another for iPads, one for Apple itself, just trying to find information about an Apple product could mean navigating a half-dozen websites with different suffixes. And what if a ukelele manufacturer wants to use dot uk or dot uke?

The ICANN says that it cost tens of millions of dollars to create and new suffix, so they will be charging $185,000 to apply for one and $25,000 annually to maintain one. The common suffixes only cost around $10 a year. It will subsidize developing countries with a $2 million fund they have set aside for that purpose. Just the plan for all this came in at around 350 pages and took six years to write. Sorting out who gets what could take major diplomatic skills.

Canon has already announced that it will go after dot canon. That would be just plain redundant – canon dot canon. It will be the big companies that take advantage of this new system. But, this can turn into a big business opportunity for companies that stake out and sell internet addresses. One of those companies could buy a suffix like dot books and parcel it out to thousands of small books stores that could never afford the fees on their own, that is if Amazon or Barnes and Noble don’t snap it up on day one. Buying and selling domain names is already a huge business.

Applications for the new suffixes will be accepted after January 12, 2012. However, this could be a breakthrough whose time has actually passed. With so many people using search engines to find what they want or skipping from site to site with links or simply using apps, there are shortcuts that would inhibit the use of any new address. Even the address field on my internet access shortcuts for me. I type in three letters and sites pop up for me to just click. It doesn’t matter what the suffix is for my bank when all I have to type is the first three letters of their domain.