Friday, June 17, 2011

This will change the way we use the Internet

The National Post seems to have liked my column this week on ICANN's next-generation domain names. It's promoted three times this morning on the "NP Entrepreneur" home page (see photo).

The story suggestion came from Naseem Javed, corporate-naming expert and founder of ABC Namebank. He's really excited about the new opportunities that will emerge out of the creation of a whole new set of domain names: instead of dot-com, you can have dot-blog, dot-Kodak, dot-Calgary, dot-anythingyouwant.

There are a few catches. One, the regime has yet to be approved by ICANN, the world's top domain decision-maker. (But the betting is it will be approved next week.) Secondly, simply applying for one of these "generic top-level domains" will set you back $200,000 or more.

But as Javed points out, once you own one of these gTLDs, the opportunity to become your own domain-name registrar by selling lower-level URLS to other businesses (music.vancouver, police.vancouver, hockey.vancouver, plateglass.vancouver) could be huge.

As the story says:
"Up for grabs are some of the world's most valuable names and words: dot-hockey, dot-travel, dot-music, dotmontreal, dot-toronto. No suffix (i.e., dot-com, dot-ca) required. This will change the way businesses and people use the Internet; and although ICANN has been planning this change for three years, it's still mainly just the geeks who know about it."
Click here to read the complete story.