

For $185k Brands Can (soon) Apply For Their Own TLD - Urgo
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-internet-names-idUSTRE75G49W20110617

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blhack
Honestly, who cares?

(From a consumer's standpoint. Apple, microsoft, et al will care _a lot_ ,
which I'll explain)

I predict that nobody will use this. People like Apple will probably buy .mac
and .apple, windows will buy .windows etc., but as a poster pointed out below,
they will probably just redirect to the .com

This really feels like a money grab by ICANN; and is in pretty poor form.

Consider non-technical people. They're _just_ figuring out .com. Most of them
don't understand subdomains that aren't www.

I'll see people type things like www.images.google.com or www.mail.yahoo.com
or www.mail.yahoo.com etc. etc.

Even if it was .apple, you'd still have huge parts of their customer base
typing something.apple.com -- getting the .apple accomplishes nothing but
increased revenue for ICANN.

.com is a brand name. .ly is cute, .net is geeky, .org is kindof cool, but at
the end, .com is what most people understand.

But I'm sure that ICANN will enjoy the $185k ransom that they're going to
effectively be holding over everybody's head when this goes live!

"Pay us $185k or .apple is going to go to somebody other than you. Be a shame
if that happened, wouldn't it?"

Disgusting.

~~~
sebastianavina
I don't think so...

in any time, you could write "apple" on your navigator, and instead of
performing an automatic google search for apple, it will send you to apple
website...

the same for a lot of words like google

~~~
blhack
Will the browsers play ball with that, though? Technically, the tld is .apple,
so you'd have to type .apple into the browser.

Google isn't a charity; they want you typing "apple" into the address bar,
then seeing ads for apple before clicking on apple.com. As it stands now, they
could accomplish exactly what you're saying.

Check to see if there is a ".com" associated with the single word you type,
and take you there.

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staunch
Seems like such a bad idea and ICANN seems to be far more motivated by revenue
than they should be.

The ICANN CEO is getting around $1 million/year in compensation.

I bet there is a line of smart internet people willing to run ICANN who are
far more altruistic.

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joshklein
From the perspective of brands, this may be a big deal. $185k is a drop in the
bucket, and large organizations with marketing budgets held in different
divisions often have very different infrastructure (sometimes because those
divisions are separate companies that have been acquired, have a separate P&L,
etc). New product launches have to deal with domain availability and possible
trademark squatters. Some brands have different websites for different
segments of their audience. Some brands launch websites just to support a
specific marketing effort, such as cause marketing or event support.

This is absolutely a head-scratcher for small orgs, but is pretty convenient
(a convenience easily worth $185k) for the big brands. I think their example
of .apple is a silly one. A better example might be P&G, J&J, Pfizer, The
Pepsi Company, etc.

~~~
mycroftiv
Apple's market cap is 300 billion. Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are
both at 180 billion. Pfizer is 160 billion and Pepsi is 110 billion. So why
exactly is Apple a silly example?

~~~
smiler
Notice he's talking about brands - because Apple don't have multiple brands,
apple.com is fine.

But for big companies in the food & beverage, homecare sectors etc, they have
a _lot_ of sub brands. They want to de-emphasise their company name (because
nobody cares about them) and sell the brand.

For example, do you know off the top of your head the brands of P&G?

However, if I told you Old Spice, Gilette, Oral-B, Pantene etc, it starts to
make a lot more sense to have .oldspice, .gillette .oralb .pantene and so on.

~~~
justincormack
That makes no sense.

<http://apple/> might make sense.

But what would .pantene do? blonde.prov.pantene? They are not going to
subdomain them under .pg.

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Aloisius
I look forward to the day when I'm not sure if something is a URL or not.

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evanrmurphy
I have trouble seeing why maps.google is such a meaningful step from
maps.google.com.

Less to type... Maybe non-technical users who never understood why the hell
everything ended with ".com" will be more comfortable.

Reminds me of when the W3C decided we should be able to do <header> instead of
<div id="header">.

------
x03
If large companies have the extra cash to drop extending their online
identities in this very small way, then there's really no harm to the broader
eco-system of domains.

There will likely be a few "fun" uses of this, say drink.coke, but coke.com
will still remain the far more compelling implementation and their own
personal TLDs will simply become presences that offer little practical
benefits, but were bought simply because they were there -- and the press
coverage that the purchase may achieve may in fact just garner equal to or
more than the $185,000 they originally spent.

Overall, this will likely just be a small boon for the kind of consultancy
firms mentioned in the original article: but it will offer little in the way
of actual affects to the rest of us.

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Metapony
Does this mean domains like <http://snort.coke> are going to be available?
Rock on!

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janesvilleseo
Since this is going to effect large brands because you need to pay to play,
this is going to make phishing attempts even more effective. Not because the
phisher will have the .ebay or .paypal, but it will make the URL even hard to
dechiper whether it is legit or not.

------
smiler
I think companies will just register these and re-direct to their .com

More and more adverts as well are now carrying facebook URLs rather than
traditional URLs, so it will be interesting to see how marketing departments
respond to this and what they do.

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alphadog
_scratches head_

This is news to me. Perhaps the author of the post has gotten some basic facts
wrong?

~~~
anigbrowl
Nope.

[http://www.cojk.com/icann-issues-a-timeline-for-approval-
of-...](http://www.cojk.com/icann-issues-a-timeline-for-approval-of-new-gtld-
procedures-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-or-collision-course-for-brand-
owners/)

<http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/comments-7-en.htm>

I'm not invested in the domain marketplace, but somehow this gives me a bad
feeling about exclusionary access to what is sure to be a land grab. Who is
going to get the .music or .law domains, for example? I understand they want
someone who is capable of operating a domain registry and can put up $185,000,
but there's a rather disheartening 'pay to play' feel to it.

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fletchowns
So if this passed, who would be in control of a TLD like .london? What about
.porn?

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dstein
Hopefully this implodes the absurdity that is .com squatting.

~~~
PonyGumbo
I suspect the squatting will just continue on the new TLDs.

~~~
highace
At 185k a pop? Plus I believe you also have to prove a legitimate claim on the
name.

~~~
walexander
There are .coms that sell for millions, so $185k for a .whatever domain seems
reasonable (well, not really, but it's reasonable to expect people will pay
for it). I wonder who can legitimately claim .food, or .cars, though.

Great idea by ICANN, though. They've successfully just turned domains into
beanie babies and magic TG cards.

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jhuckestein
Enjoy the biggest regexp breakage since Y2K in 3 ... 2 ... 1

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callmeed
.yc ?

~~~
mrspandex
h.ackernews

