Envision an internet experience in which a consumer’s online trolling is more like strolling down your typical Main Street. If they feel like catching a flick, they go to .movie. If they’re looking to treat themselves to a spa experience, they go to .spa.
It’s what Peter Dengate Thrush calls “a common sense expansion of the commercial world onto the internet,” and it got a lot closer to becoming a reality on Wednesday.
Executives from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) revealed at a press conference in London that the group has received 1,930 applications for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). It announced who the applicants are and for which ‘strings’ (or extensions) they have filed.
A gTLD is an internet domain name extension, such as .com or .org. While there are currently 22 such ‘generics’ in the domain name system, ICANN created a program that allows businesses, communities and governments to apply for new gTLDs in the internet’s addressing system.
Dengate Thrush, former ICANN chairman and currently chairman of Top Level Domain Holdings, attended the press conference and later shared with Marketing what this announcement means for marketers.
Using a real estate analogy, he said that previously brands would have been tenants in the dot com space. As such, they didn’t have many rights and couldn’t, for example, choose who the registrars for a .com were. “All that changes when you are in the building yourself and it’s your shop,” he said.
In other words, if Nike owns .Nike, it can pick which registrars it wants to use and control things like the security levels. This, said Dengate Thrush, gives brand owners much more control over the uses and appearance of their brand, and also allows them to abandon “defensive registrations they’ve piled up in other places trying to play this whack-a-mole game with some of the infringers.”
It also benefits consumers in that “they know that if it ends in .nike, they’re dealing with the genuine article.”
The first round of applications (which were accepted up until May 30 after the application widow opened on Jan. 12, 2012) will now go through a 20-month evaluation process by ICANN, during which Dengate Thrush said background checks and the quality of the applicants’ registry platforms will be reviewed, as well as their financial plans.
Dengate Thrush advised that marketers and advertises apply to protect their own brands since it will be several years before the application process will be opened again like this. Otherwise, he said, your competitors could apply for the gTLD you want for your brand before you “and worse, there may be some people who’ve actually applied for the generic name for your industry, so if you’re making carpet, someone may well have applied for .carpet.”
For a full list of the new gTLD strings that have been applied for and the applicant groups, from Google to Pioneer, click here.
