ICANN goes ahead -- and the world will never be the same again

All this talk of domains
can make a Kat go dotty ..

With a somewhat leaden heart, this Kat has been reading the news, courtesy of Guardian Online, that internet naming board ICANN has approved the long-expected vast expansion of domain suffixes to the existing 22 international global top level domains (gTLDs).  According to the article,

"Twenty-six years after .com was first unveiled to the world, officials have swept away tight regulations governing website naming, opening up a whole world of personalised web address suffixes. ...

Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of Icann's board of directors, said: "Today's decision will usher in a new internet age. We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration [this Kat wonders what Mr Thrush's definitions of creativity and inspiration look like]. Unless there is a good reason to restrain it, innovation should be allowed to run free."

Analysts say they expect 500 to 1,000 domain suffixes, mostly for companies and products looking to stamp their mark on web addresses, but also for cities and generic names such as .bank or .hotel. Websites can now be categorised by subjects such as industry, geography and ethnicity – as well as using Arabic, Chinese and other scripts [this should be fun, says Merpel, who wonders how quickly Western Kats will learn to identify the main ones, for good or ill].  ...it will also now be possible to have website names entirely in Mandarin or Cyrillic or any other script, which will ease the problem of reading and writing addresses for the majority of people who do not use the Roman alphabet.

The growth will also come as the internet shifts to the next-generation IPv6 addressing system for its basic systems, which enables far more devices to be attached to the internet [The IPKat has already managed to attach his fridge and his toaster, but he's struggling to get his vacuum cleaner into the USB port].

ICANN approved the move after six years of negotiations, in which concerns were repeatedly expressed that the enormous expansion of suffixes could lead to extra costs for businesses of registering a site with their trademark as the number of suffixes explodes.During the 1990s there were hundreds of cases of "domain squatting" in which people would register sites that used companies' trademarked names, effectively holding them to ransom. Expanding the number of domains could make that far worse.[Only during the 1990s? And only 'hundreds'?]

But it would also ease the pressure on the ".com" domain, created 26 years ago. In May 2009 a study found that 74% of websites were in the .com domain space. ...

... [O]thers said that the promise of space could be a double-edged sword. "If you're a company with a lot of money, such as Barclays, then you could buy the '.barclays' suffix and build a little island on the internet, on the basis that you can persuade customers that only legitimate Barclays sites will end with that," said Charlie Abrahams, of the brand protection company MarkMonitor. "If your brand has just three letters, it might be worth it. If you're Tommy Hilfiger, it's probably not, because I can't imagine anyone bothering to type all that at the end of a URL." [The IPKat gave up typing URLs years ago; he clicks them when they're hyperlinks and cuts and pastes them into his browser when they're not]

However, the principal beneficiaries are likely to be the internet registrars who sell the rights to site names. ICANN has set a $185,000 fee per suffix, and applicants have to work their way through a 360-page guidebook to prepare their bids ahead of the first suffix auctions, which start on 12 January 2012 and run for 90 days. ICANN says it will auction suffixes if multiple parties have legitimate claims [Apple? Prudential? Polo? Washington? Birmingham? Madonna? Cambridge? EPO? This one can run and run ...]. However, it expects companies will reach deals to avoid a public auction [No they won't, says Merpel, if the hawk-eyed competition folk at the European Commission have anything to do with it and sniff the comfortable scent of collusion between competitors ...]. ...

The ICANN board approved the move by 13 votes to one with two abstentions in a meeting in Singapore. ... The move could also create enormous confusion for consumers and companies. It greatly expands the risks from "phishing" sites because they could use confusing domain names in language scripts that look similar to existing ones to capture peoples' details. And for companies, the challenge will be to decide whether to register their names in all possible domains, or to create their own suffix, or to limit themselves to a small number of domains."

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