By the way, when I call the process "corporatist," I am not anti-big-business.
Quite the contrary: This is a Web site by a mid-sized company, explicitly for big businesses.
Big business should have a seat at the table. But they should not be the ONLY ones at the table. That's bad for everyone, including the big businesses.
It seems that ICANN and internet are practicing approaches that seem quite opposite to each other. ICANN's corporatist, exclusive entry barrier, lock-in vs. that of Internet's crowd-sourced, no/low barriers, inclusive. I thought ICANN was working to advance the internet.
I hope Mitch somebody from ICANN read your article and the associated comments.
As I think of it, the problem with this project is the $85,000 application fee. It just looks bad. It makes it look like ICANN is greedy, and like people who have more money to spend should ahve a greater voice in this issue. Very, very undemocratic and corporatist.
Instead, ICANN should have let ANYONE suggest new gTLDs, for no fee. They could have crowdsourced the selection product, Wikipedia-style, and let the crowdsourcing community pick the best 1,000 every year.
At that point, ICANN could have stepped in and selected companies to administer the domain. At that time, an application fee to demonstrate seriousness and scale would have been entirely appropriate.
I think domain names will matter for quite a while, because people get used to them. Maybe the next generation will use Google and apps and not care about how the URL looks (or it will not even be visible), but right now we pay attention to that.
I tend to think it isn't that necessary for most types of business. i doubt it will change your traffic that much. The main thing is marketing still. Then again maybe in these unique fields like music and arts that sell on celebrity status, it may be a good idea.
'...To purchase a customTLD, you will need to pay at least $100,000....Apparently, these are the costs required to register and maintain the servers for the custom ending....'
I wonder what the actual cost is right now because that would be a major limiting factor for most organisations. IMO if it is anything close to 100k per year, thats enough to market a generic domain site well enough to have everyone talking about it in no time. Then again it matters what your original interest for a custom TLD is...
@MenInKilts — SEO ain't what it used to be, if it ever was, and it's getting more tenuous all the time. On Monday I'll have a blog post up about the ways personalized and socialized search are changing the game.
Journalist Dan Gillmor says the new gTLDs are a massive boondoggle, and says ICANN is unnecessary, and out of touch with reality. He says the Internet needs alternatives.
I certainly think that the phonemes and words used for brand names are overrated. Look at Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon, to name just a few examples. Some of these are nonsense words, and the word "Amazon" didn't have anything to do with shopping until the company came along and made those words synonymous.
When I first heard about Amazon, I thought it was a feminist bookstore.
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