ICANN has URL?
Ah, URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been widely reported and almost uniformly lamented, the ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.
- via barbarian blog
I think that is an overreaction to this change. First of all, people have complained that the old .com/.net/.org/etc system was an unnecessary restriction for years. Many domain owners would feel the need to register mycompany.com and every variation (.net, .org) just to stop domain squatters. In effect, the two-tier system was one-tier, since the TLDs were meaningless (“.com” doesn’t mean anything anymore). ICANN has slowly approved random TLDs like .mobi, and .biz, but that has further diluted any meaning of those TLDs.
Now they are going to allow any TLD to be registered (for $100,000 and ability to run your own root nameserver). For the little guys, this isn’t going to matter. For the big guys, like say PepsiCo, they can finally own “pepsi”. You will be able to just type in “http://pepsi” and go to their site. The “.com”, “.net” etc will probably still exist, but won’t be important anymore. Email addresses can shrink to “user@pepsi”.
Also, the complaint that we will start seeing domains like “something.completelyrandomandlong” is moot. People can do that already. If you have $100000 to blow, be my guest. These are novelty domains and more frequently linked to than typed in anyway.
Is this the end of the URL? Well, it’s been reported that in places like Japan there is a trend in advertising billboards to show a search box with a search term filled in instead of an http:// URL. I’ve also seen that in America a bit. It’s really the sheer volume of domains and web sites, and the convenience of searching that has caused URLs to sort of wane in advertising utility. But the recent ICANN change could provide shorter, easier to use URLs. “http://pepsi” is short and clear. If anything, this may be the resurgence of the URL for advertising purposes.
Is it going to be easier to find things on the internet now? No, but some links may be shorter.
Is there going to be a huge rush of ridiculously named URLs? Doubtful. It costs a lot and is not a simple task to operate a TLD.
