Is ICann cashing in with a liberalised domain policy?

Yesterday, ICann the governing body for internet domains announced they will be allowing anyone to bid for almost an unlimited list of new domains. At a $100,000 for control of a domain, .hotel, .schools etc are all up for grabs.

Icann doesn’t expect there to be a huge rush and claims they simply want to recover the cost of setting up the infrastructure (they are a non-profit org.).

Some restrictions – no cyber squatting, anything too dodgy (they reserve the right to refuse) and no personal names unless you’re a business.

They will also allow non-Roman character sets in the domain, which is going to cause problems for international businesses as the Roman keyboard is well established.

Until recently, non-regional domains like .com caused problems for search engines as they attempted to provide more localised results. But these days you can set your geo-location at least in Google, and the others are likely to follow.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of this move by Icann – people are generally used to guessing the domain extension and if a lot of companies decide to use it, there’ll just be more confusion.

The barriers to owning and managing a top level domain is too high for most companies, though we will definitely see some of the more generic commercial domains being bought. I can imagine domains like .hotels, .property and .bank getting bought. And any companies within these industries having to buy their name, even if they simply redirect it to their existing domain.

You may see more creative use of domains in time, maybe celebrities and sport teams using them as merchandise. I’m sure most football fans would happily pay 20 quid to have their team domain in their name.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Search engine marketing industry. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.