Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Thursday 26 June 2008, 5:26 PM
ICANN has .cheezburger
According to the Beeb, ICANN's board has unanimously approved major changes to the way web URLs are constructed. We'll be running a full story on this shortly, but here's the main gist of what will now be allowed:
* Custom domain names - It's no longer a game of .uk, .it etc as based on countries... we will probably soon be seeing .mcdonalds and .dell. Basically anything goes, although a bit of money to back it up will help, as trademarks will get priority.
* Internationalised domain names - URLs are currently all in English-friendly script, no matter where in the world. Other scripts like Chinese and Arabic will now be allowed.
* And yes, this could help .xxx become a reality.
The exact way in which this will all work will still need to be finalised, but the major hurdle has been cleared. Sadly, I feel I may personally lose out in my bid for .meyer to the cookware company...
PreviousComments on this post
it is going to be interesting, I imagine a domain like www.BurgerKing.mcdonalds would raise eyebrows. Personally, I dont think its necessary; if TLDs like .tv, .me.uk, .biz and even .net have struggled to catch on, what use is a custom domain?
Most companies that create custom domains will probably want to keep them internal in case someone's out to turnish their image.
Surely this is just going to make things so much more confusing for everyone involved, especially the user? The standardised domain names meant it was pretty easy to call up a site because if you knew the company name, you could always just stick a ".com" on the end and it would work. OK so you can just google for it, but then if you're hit with masses of sites all claiming to be the same but with different domain extensions its going to get confusing?
Still one thing is for sure, there is going to be a crazy domain gold rush as these all go live and people buy up the great names...might join them :-)
