New TLD Guide

Last week ICANN held its 38th public meeting in the centre of Brussels, Belgium.

While the new TLD project was a topic up for discussion it might not have been "the" topic last week.

In any case nothing definitive about new TLDs was decided in Brussels.

ICANN's board will be meeting again in September to try to "put to bed" some of the outstanding issues, but whether they'll be able to pull it off or not remains to be seen.

ICANN has published an updated set of documents in relation to the launch of new top level domains.

The "Draft Application Guidebook" which is now in its 4th iteration is aimed at prospective operators of new domain extensions and covers a wide range of topics in relation to applying for, launching and running a new domain extension.

Not everyone speaks English.
Not everyone writes using Latin characters.
Unfortunately up until a couple of days ago there was no way to have a domain name 100% in a character set other than Latin. Sure, you could get special characters in the domain, but not in the extension ie. the part on the left of the "." could use special characters, but the bit on the right couldn't. So you could register a .com or a .eu with special characters in it, but the actual domain extension was still in ASCII.

ICANN has announced that the first non-Latin domain extensions are now online. You can read more about it on the ICANN blog

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ICANN has stated that it is "on track" with its new TLD plans, but if you were hoping to register something like .film or .blog anytime soon you would be disappointed.

The current situation is that the project is moving forward, but there are no clearly defined timelines.

At an educated guess predicting that registrations could open in 2012 might not be unreasonable, but it is NOT a "given".

Antony Van Couvering from Minds and Machines has published a revised timeline based on the current "state of play". It's not fixed or "set in stone", but it's probably as accurate a timeline as anyone could produce in the current circumstances.

Antony's timeline predicts an application round for companies wanting to run a new domain space (extension) in Q2 of 2011. Applications in that round would need to be evaluated etc., so you'd expect the process to last through until Q4 of 2011, with the public being able to actually get domains in Q1 of 2012.

It would be nice to see this kind of timeline coming into being, but I strongly suspect that each of the various stages will be longer than anyone can currently predict (based on how slow the process has been to date).

You can read Antony's article here or check out the timeline image below (click to enlarge):



What do you think?

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Minds and Machines have launched a new site targetted at prospective candidates for "city TLDs".

The site provides information on what they predict will be the application process for a city that wants to run their own domain space.

While the site is obviously going to push the Minds and Machines' services to some extent it's still a pretty good source of information for city managers or people who are interested in understanding how the process may work.

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The city of Paris has launched its online campaign for the .paris domain extension.

With a dedicated site, currently in French only, as well as both Facebook and Twitter presences, the .paris initiative is currently collecting signatories for its petition.  You can also show your support for .paris with a widget for your blog or website.

The city of Paris currently has a population of over 2 million, while the Greater Paris region is home to 12 million inhabitants.

During the ICANN meeting in Paris two years ago the city's mayor declared that Paris would be applying to have its own corner of cyberspace, so it's nice to see them carrying through on their promise.

The project is supported by the City of Paris, AFNIC and CORE.

There will be an English language site available shortly as well.

Those involved with new TLD projects have been waiting "in the wings" for the last couple of months, as it was very unclear how ICANN intended to move forward

After the meeting in Seoul ICANN seem to have found a way of moving forward, though we will have to wait and see exactly how that pans out.

As new TLD projects come out of hiding we'll try to keep you up to date

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Just because something is new doesn't mean it's a bad idea. (Of course you could also argue tht the converse is true ... )

So how do big companies and the general public feel about the concept of new domain extensions?

This short video from dotBerlin shows one possible scenario:



So what do you think?

While I am in favour of the introduction of new domain extensions, there are quite a few people who are against the whole idea.

So what are the arguments against them?

Confusion is a common one.

According to some naysayers the public, that's you, me and everyone else, is going to be "confused".

Confusion is a wonderful argument. If people are confused then they may make bad decisions or mistakes.

But is it a valid argument?

I think not.

The "end user confusion" argument always brings a smile to my face.

Would someone please show me all these confused end users please?

The only "arguments" I've seen to date have been extreme "edge cases" presented by corporate trademark lawyers with an agenda. Just because one user in a million might do something evil with a domain name does not mean that all users are going to. In any case most Western democracies still try to uphold the "innocent until proven guilty" concept.

 A year ago most users would never have visited a .ly domain, yet bit.ly is now an incredibly popular service ... Are users of bit.ly confused? Are they special in some way? Of course not.

 There's no reason why users wouldn't embrace new TLDs in the same way.

In any case it's the services and content that is built on the namespace and not the namespace itself that will make the difference. The case of ".ly" is a good example of this.

Why the creators of a URL shortener chose the .ly cctld for their service isn't important. It's what they did with the name that makes all the difference.

So imagine if someone were able to setup .movie as a domain extension. Wouldn't that be a lot more logical than "bighitthemovie.com" or "bigstudyproductionthefilm.com", as is so often the case now? Look at the poster for any big Hollywood release and you'll see what I mean.

Take "Transformers" and its sequel that came out earlier this summer. What domain name are they using? Transformersmovie.com. Admittedly transformers.com redirects to a Hasbro site, but wouldn't transformers.movie be a lot simpler and more logical?

Or would that confuse people?

If you are living in London and you want to get a pizza from Pizza Hut do you really care about the opening hours of Pizza Hut in Denver?

Imagine if you could go to pizzahut.london or pizzahut.nyc? While you could go to pizzahut.co.uk, you'd still have to waste time trying to find the listings for London.

Bigger cities like London, Paris, New York, Barcelona and Rome have large populations that need services. If you could register a domain name for your business that showed exactly where it was located, wouldn't that be a boon?

There are a number of companies and organisations who would like to launch domain extensions (TLDs) to service that very need.

Have a look at this video from the former mayor of New York Ed Koch:



Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?