Domain names have been the focus of articles in America's two leading
quality newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, over
the last few days.
The New York Times looked at country code Top Level Domains that have
attempted to broaden their base by exploiting their code. For example,
the attempt by the .CO (Colombia) registry to market themselves as an
alternative to .COM and .ME (Montenegro) to promote its use by social
media sites and bloggers.
With more than 600,000 registrations of .CO domains in over 200
countries, the registry notes they hope to reach five million
registrations with five years.
Meanwhile The Washington Post looks at the expansion of new generic Top
Level Domains saying "the trusty .com domain ... is about to face vast
new competition that will dramatically transform the Web as we know it."
The article looks at potentially controversial gTLD strings such as
.ABORTION, .ISLAM or .MUHAMMAD and asks who will get to operate these
controversial gTLDs. "Can the Ku Klux Klan own .NAZI on free speech
grounds, or will a Jewish organization run the domain and permit only
educational Web sites - say, remember.nazi or antidefamation.nazi? And
who's going to get .AMAZON - the Internet retailer or Brazil?"
While there are bound to be some controversial gTLDs applied for, it is
hard to imagine the demand for many of their suggestions. Maybe .AMAZON
could be in demand.
One controversial gTLD could be .GAY with two groups likely to apply for
the rights to operate it, while .ECO also has two groups interested in
applying for this string, one of which is "a nonprofit chaired by former
vice president Al Gore; the other from a group founded by former Soviet
Union president Mikhail Gorbachev."
Not being based in the US, it is hard to fully comprehend whether the concerns expressed in .GAY are reasonable.
Scott Seitz, the CEO of DotGay LLC, "who is gay, said the simple idea of
operating the domain devoted to the gay movement exerts its own
pressures. 'I have a responsibility, and I am in awe of that,'" Seitz
told The Washington Post, "adding that he and his business partners
intend on donating two-thirds of their revenue to various social causes.
'I buried 40 friends in 18 months [who died from complications related
to HIV]. Having .GAY is scary, it could be crazy. I've already told
people to get steel doors and window bars for security to protect
against anti-gay organizations that wouldn't want dot-gay to happen.'"
To read the articles in full, see:
For Countries That Own Shorter Web Site Suffixes, Extra Cash From Abroad
www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/technology/07dotco.html
Rush is on for custom domain name suffixes
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/06/AR2011020603940.html
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