JIM RAPOZA
Back to the future
ICANN’s domain proposal harkens to the old days, but beware
Isn’t nostalgia great? nowa- one, namely in the cost to join Is it mybank.com? mybank.
days it seems like any old in. Getting an old-school .com bank? mybank.money?).
trend, TV show or celebrity domain could be done for the In the end I think ICANN
is coming back. Hula hoops, cost of lunch. Participating in is making this move for one
Transformers, “Battlestar this TLD will cost a bit more— reason: money. Or, to use
Galactica” … heck, there’s even most likely $100,000-plus. another Internet trend, it’s their
a Smurfs movie coming out. I admit that when I heard “ICANN Has More Money?”
And, based on some this proposal I was torn. Tech- strategy (it sounds cuter that
recent news, it looks like nically, there is no reason why way).
another fun old trend will there shouldn’t be a variety of This proposal is clearly
be making a return perfor- options in the TLD. The con- focused to generate profit
mance in coming years. trols over them have become from large companies and
Remember the heyday too strong, and the TLDs don’t government entities. And
of the old Internet bubble? really mean anything. I mean, while ICANN says its will
Remember how everyone
and their uncle were rushing
to gobble up every Internet
domain name that might There will be more than
prove to be even slightly a few shady characters
valuable? Well, guess what? controlling TLDs.
That’s coming back!
At its recent meeting in
Paris, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and how many sites with .com are award TLDs only to those
Numbers, or ICANN, unani- actually companies? with solid business plans, I’ll
mously approved a proposal But looking at this pro- be willing to bet a really nice
to open up top-level domain posal, I think it has the lunch that in the end there
names in coming years. Now potential to cause much will be more than a few shady
for those who don’t know, the more harm than good. From characters controlling TLDs.
TLDs are the base of all Inter- the perspective of bad guys, We’ll see if opening up the
net addresses, with examples the ability to trick people core domains of the Internet
being .com, .net, .gov and .org. into going to what they think is a good or bad idea.
Under ICANN’s new pro- are legitimate sites will get Right now I’m leaning
posal, anything will become a whole lot easier. Business toward bad. Though that
fair game for a new TLD: competition could get ugly doesn’t mean I’m not hoard-.sex, .money, .smurfs, .mov- in these areas (if Hyatt owns ing my pennies to snatch up
ies, .ICANNshamelessmon- .hotels, where does that leave that .techgod domain. ´
eygrab, you name it. Marriott and Hilton?). And
Of course there will be some the potential for user confu- Chief Technology Analyst Jim
key differences between this sion will increase dramati- Rapoza can be reached at
Internet land grab and the last cally (What’s the Web site? jrapoza@eweek.com.
