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Internet's naming system opens to .anything suffix
by Jamie Anderson - June 21, 2011 - comments
The Internet is moving way beyond dot-com with the ICANN deciding to accept any word in any language as a possible domain name suffix.
Ask anybody who has little knowledge of the World Wide Web. “.com, .edu, .org; yes that are the domain names we are all familiar with,” is the most likely answer.
Very shortly the answer will have a much longer list than these generic top-level domain names.
Flood gates opened
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group that manages Internet addresses, has decided to accept almost any word in any language as a domain name.
“ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination,” Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN was quoted as saying in The Christian Science Monitor.
So the dot com world will extend to ‘.shop’, ‘.play’ or for that matter ‘.anything’. The list will be as long as one’s imagination or the nature of business one is operating in.
At present there are 22 generic domains and close to about 250 country-level domain names such as .uk or .de.
“ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination,” Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN was quoted as saying in The Christian Science Monitor.
“Today's decision respects the rights of groups to create new top-level domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind,” added Beckstrom.
Expensive proposition
The new system, to be opened up in 2012, will come with a huge price tag though; a whopping $185,000.
The ICANN requirements stipulate that applicants be “established public or private organizations,” with the requisite competence to keep a domain running.
In the new scenario, companies may end up wrestling and wrangling over particular desirable URLs. Thus ICANN could find itself in “a never-ending series of decisions it doesn't want to deal with.”
“With this pricing and annual fee plan, there's no way I could have that or www.home.lanceulanoff,” analyst Lance Ulanoff opined.
“ICANN may believe it's heading off lots of confusion and a hoard of greedy squatters, but I think they're starting a fire in the corporate world and handcuffing everyone else,” noted Ulanoff.
Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, ICANN is a non-profit corporation is responsible for managing the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6).
The responsibility of assigning address blocks to regional Internet registries, maintaining registries of Internet protocol identifiers, in addition to managing top-level domain name space also rests with ICANN.