ICANN To Allow .brandname Top-Level Domains

AndyAndyAndyAndy sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report: "Brand owners will soon be able to operate their own parts of the Web — such as .apple, .coke or .marlboro — if the biggest shake-up yet in how Internet domains are awarded is approved. After years of preparation and wrangling, ICANN, the body that coordinates Internet names, is expected to approve the move at a special board meeting in Singapore on Monday. ... The move is seen as a big opportunity for brands to gain more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to parts of their sites — and a danger for those who fail to take advantage."

Comments

Monetization of what should be neutral

[improfane]

The internet is damaged by commercial interests. I don't think I'm speaking from nostalgia about 'the good old days' but large commercial interests have only weakened the utility of the internet.

The top level domains should be neutral. The internet is no longer neutral if every company can buy out the namespace.

I envy biological scientists and ecologists with their highly organized binomial classification systems. They're neutral. They organize information how it should be organized.

I reckon we have difficulty classifying and namespacing the internet is because we don't really know what it is. I guarantee that the information architecture will have at least one massive restructuring in our lifetimes. One day it will be called something different, like 'the link' or the 'exchange'. You know the 'omniscient' like information system that you see alien races mention in Star Trek.

Re:Funny That

[Rei]

There's a HUGE glaring hole with this notion. As someone who's filed for a trademark before, trademarks are only limited within a particular field of business. So, for example, you could have a car company named Shiny, a spatula manufacturer named Shiny, a metal alloy named Shiny, whatever.

But there's only one TLD.

So, not only is this messing over individuals, but it's *really* messing over smaller businesses or businesses who came later to the game -- even if they hold a legitimate trademark on that name. I own a small software company that happens to have the same name as a larger, established trucking company. This could happen to me.

(Oh, and if your answer to anyone is, "Just pick another name"... do you have any clue how thoroughly picked through the trademark filings are? The Futurama "popplers" joke about there only being two product names in existence left untrademarked isn't that far off. Oh, and if you use a foreign word, you have to not overlap on both the foreign word *and* its translation)

Re:Funny That

[The13thSin]

It goes beyond that... it's also about recognition.

When I see "blablabla.com" I'm pretty sure that's a website. When toplevel domains are fully customizable and some companies will presumably start using http://microsoft/ or http://apple/ ... recognition will be gone, which is very annoying and slightly confusing. Most annoying for me personally (and many others I gather) will be I can no longer use the top bar for both searching and entering a webaddress. If I enter one word right now, it searches for it and if I enter a word+".com" (or similar) it goes to the web page. How will it be able to know once we go "keyword"-ing our TLDs? (Without either having a current list of ALL TLD's (which can become a huge list) or looking it up online (which introduces lag, especially on mobiles)?

But it was bound to happen I guess... ICANN wasn't going to ignore this huge amount of money that they can make from this just because it might make sense.