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Yesterday the ICANN approved a measure that will allow any type of extensions to domains on the Web, for example: ".apple".
La organization that assigns addresses on the internet approved to allow virtually unlimited new domain names based on topics as varied as brands, political causes and entertainment, in the major reorganization of the system since it began 26 years ago |
"It will allow companies to have better control of their brands," said Theo Hnarakis, CEO of Melbourne IT, which manages customer brands such as Volvo, Lego and GlaxoSmithKline online. "For example, there might be new suffixes like '.apple' or '.ipad', which would lead customers directly to those products."
The announced colossal domain growth could help alleviate some of the problem of overlapping names with popular suffixes, especially ".com," which has 94 million registered sites.
High-profile companies in the entertainment, consumer goods and financial services sectors will likely be the first to apply for their own domain name, in a bid to protect their brands, experts say.
Those groups who can afford a $ 185.000 request will be able to request updates to their current suffixes, such as ".com" and ".net," next year, using almost any word in any language, including Arabic. and Chinese, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided during a meeting in Singapore.
ICANN's decision culminated six years of negotiations and is the largest change to the system to date since the ".com" suffix made its debut in 1984.
The expansion plan has been largely delayed for fear that the new suffixes could infringe on the use of trademarks and copyrights.
There are currently 290 country suffixes, such as ".jp" for Japan and ".fr" for France, which are typically limited to groups or individuals with a presence in those countries. There are also 22 open suffixes that include recent additions like ".tel" for telecommunications.
Analysts said they expect between 500 and 1.000 new domain names to be created, mostly for companies and products, but also for cities and generic names, such as ".hotel" for hotels or ".bank" for banks. Several groups were formed to support the creation of the suffix ".sport" for sports sites, and two conservation groups are separately seeking the right to operate a suffix ".eco".
"This is the beginning of a new phase of the internet," said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of Icann's board of directors. "Unless there is a good reason to retain it, innovation must be allowed to run wild."
Source: The Voice