Dot-anything.
It’s “the most significant change to the Internet, really, since it was created,” says Peter Dengate Thrush, the person behind said change. Do we have you hooked yet? Good.
The organization that oversees Web addresses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (of which Mr. Thrush is the board of director’s chairman), announced Monday in Singapore that it will allow nearly any word in any language to be an Internet address suffix.
“There are currently 23 common endings for a Web address – including the familiar dot-com, dot-gov, dot-edu and, of course, dot-org. Technically, every country has it’s own top-level domain (.fr for France, .mx for Mexico – you get the picture), but that’s not as fun for us advertising folk.”
So that’s cool. These days, it’s gosh-darn impossible to buy a good URL. I’m sure whoever is hoarding chrismuldoon.com is waiting for me to offer hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars for the domain. Joke’s on you, buddy! Because soon I can register chris.muldoon for the very reasonable price of – $185,000.
Yes, that will be the going rate for a new top-tier domain. So clearly, this super-awesome advancement is geared toward corporations with super-big marketing budgets. The argument is companies will be open to using their fancy-dancy addresses in ways that never seemed possible.
In the NPR article, Jeff Ernest, principal analyst at Forrester Research, gives a glimpse of the future:
“So not only is Canon now going to be dot-Canon,” he says, “but [by acquiring dot-Canon] Canon can now issue secondary domains to every one of its camera owners, and what they might very well do is embed a chip in their cameras that link that camera owner to their ID so that as they’re taking photos they could just be automatically uploading photos to a photo-sharing site. I mean, that’s just one possibility.”
So, Canon can spend $185 grand to catch up to Facebook? Good for them.
All right, I may be a bit cynical (shocking, I know). Sure, it’s just another way for a brand to have more control over their online presence. And yeah, it will challenge marketers to use this technology in innovative, effective ways.
But just one more question – doesn’t everyone just Google everything anyway?
Tagged with domain name, internet, suffix, web