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Say Hello To Branded Internet Addresses (cnet.com)
On September 29, Google published a new blog which uses .google domain rather the standard .com. It seems the company may have inspired other companies to tout their brand names in the digital realm as well. According to a report on CNET, we have since seen requests for domain names such as .kindle, .apple, .ibm, .canon, and .samsung. And it's not just tech companies that are finding this very attractive, other domain requests include .ford, .delta, .hbo, .mcdonalds, and .nike. From the report: Approval, of course, is just a first step. It's not clear how enthusiastic most companies will be about the new names. So far, Google is the eager beaver. What's fun for Google is a daunting financial commitment to others. A $185,000 application fee and annual $30,000 operation fee will keep mom-and-pop shops away from their own domains. Still, plenty of businesses other than Google see the new domain names as a good investment. Branded domains can add distinction to an internet address, and renting out generic top-level domain (GTLD) names can potentially be a lucrative business. At a January auction, GMO Registry bid $41.5 million to win rights to sell .shop domain names. And in July, Nu Dot Co won .web with a bid of $135 million. Hundreds of new top-level domain names are approved. The single most popular in use is .xyz. Hundreds of new top-level domain names are approved. The single most popular in use is .xyz. Where does all the money go? To a nonprofit organization called ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The organization oversees internet plumbing on behalf of companies, governments and universities, as well as the general public.
It actually makes sense for banks or other highly-phishable companies; if you control your own TLD, verifying valid domainnames becomes a lot easier.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
About half the users in my network just go to Google and type "youtube" anyways. When I say, "Go to the address bar, and...", it's a foreign language to them. And mobile devices now hide the address bar, sometimes making it incredibly frustrating and difficult trying to locate it. With half of all users just Google the link, and the other half expect it to be a .com, why pay that much money for a specialized web address?
I've been using the internet for a long time but help me out here. What is the goal here?
www.ibm.ibm? or just www.ibm?
ford.ford? www.cars.ford? drive.a.ford?
gmail.google instead of gmail.google.com?
You can mark me down as a firm "whatever".
I'm a 2000 man.
The only thing we saw in the .XYZ domain, was a drastic increase in spam. It was so much that we added a specific rule to the spam filter to reject connections from any email or host that used .XYZ. The other new TLDs mostly are suffering the same fate, they are full of spammers.
Don't mention that they gave away hundreds of thousands of .xyz domains for free to people who didn't even ask for them to get there.
Which has, incidentally, given it a reputation of being 99.9% spam, just like .biz. I visited abc.xyz the day Google announced its reorg, and that remains the only legitimate domain I've ever seen in that TLD. I have postfix rejecting anything with a .xyz "From" header, and it looks like I'm about to add .shop to the list.
IMO the only thing these new TLDs are accomplishing is fracturing the namespace into ever more useless niches that will never be widely accepted or compatible. Oh well, it's their money, if they want to waste it.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I received a letter from my bank and it had a "link" to their website, i bet 99% of the people who got that mail didn't realize banco.bradesco was actually a website. It didn't have a http or www that most people now are familiar with, it was just banco.bradesco, you could think they missed a space if you were not careful.
Years having to tell people they don't need to write http:/// now they "changed" it and people will begging to ask again - "banco.bradesco? So www.branco.bradesco? How about http, this one have that thing too? How do i open it? Oh just a regular site? " :-(