ICANN is the global organization in charge of managing top level domain (TLD) extensions like .com and .org. Today, they let you choose from just 21 TLDs when creating a website address. Beginning in mid-2009 at the earliest, that choice might become infinite. How does that affect you?

In June, the ICANN Board approved a recommendation that could allow people to use virtually any new TLD. So new web addresses might emerge for specific locations (e.g. .london), markets (.films, .restaurant) or even companies (.microsoft, .ebay).

Nothing is explicitly off limits, though processes will be put in place to manage potential trademark conflicts and to prevent the creation of so-called offensive TLDs.

But what does that mean for .com web addresses, and for the familiar country code domains such as .co.uk? Perhaps less than you might think...

Firstly, someone has to apply to act as the managing authority for a new TLD (become a domain registrar). While the pricing structure has yet to be announced, industry estimates have put the price of such an application at over £50,000. Popular extensions are likely to be auctioned off to the highest qualified buyer, raising the price even further.

As well as the application fees, there are significant technological hurdles to becoming a domain registrar, and none of these come cheap. So the opportunity to own and operate a TLD is likely to be reserved for very large entities. SMEs are simply unable to commit that level of financial and technical resources, even if they wanted to.

But let's assume a registrar comes forward for a particular TLD and then sells individual URLs using that TLD at an acceptable price. Perhaps you can get www.mybusiness.london for a few hundred pounds. Then you face the next (bigger) problem; overcoming the titanic momentum that comes with the status quo.

To succeed on a wide scale, any new TLD needs to become as "familiar" to the average internet user as .com and .co.uk. An impossible task.

Over the last decade or more, every visitor to an established website has likely seen the .com or .co.uk extension. The association is now so automatic that a URL such as "www.kingsarms.london" simply looks like it's missing something.

Every time a website is promoted, online or offline, the existing domain extensions are subliminally reinforced. Of the top 100 most visited sites in the UK (as measured by Alexa.com), 24 use the .co.uk domain extension, 66 are .com sites (many are global sites that are also visited from the UK) and the remaining 10 share a mish-mash of other extensions.

Think back to the last 10 sites you visited, or that you saw advertised on TV, in newspapers or magazines.

How many of them were .co.uk? How many of them were .com?

The chances are that none of them used any other domain extension. Now what about your own company's website? Most likely, it also has a .co.uk or .com domain name.

Billions and billions of pounds have been spent essentially promoting .co.uk and .com (and to a much lesser extent certain other "familiar" domain extensions such as .net or .org). Every time a URL is displayed in a piece of marketing material, on a billboard, on the side of a truck, that's another "win" for the status quo.

Any new TLD will need to break into a market that is already saturated. So a business that decides to register a domain name under a new TLD, instead of the established .co.uk or .com, can expect enormous problems getting people to remember and use that URL.

You only have to look at the ineffectual penetration of previous "new" TLDs to see just how tough the struggle can get. Organisations in the travel industry have been entitled to register domain names under the .travel extension since January 2006. Have you ever seen a .travel site?

Does .museum sound any more familiar? They've been available since 2001, yet only a few hundred such domains exist, and many simply redirect to an existing website (e.g. imperial.war.museum redirects to iwm.org.uk).

The most likely scenario is that large companies will move to secure their own name and core brands as TLDs, but simply redirect those to their existing websites. After all, ownership of a new TLD will cost them significantly less than a TV campaign.

For the average company, any new TLD will be nothing more than background noise, a choice of last resort if they can't secure the domain name they wanted in a more desirable extension.

Edwin Hayward
www.memorabledomains.co.uk  

SELECTED REFERENCES
The original ICANN announcement:-
www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm

Alexa.com's list of 100 top UK sites:-
www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=GB&ts_mode=country

ABOUT MEMORABLE DOMAINS
Memorable Domains (www.memorabledomains.co.uk) specialises in the sale of strong, premium generic .co.uk domain names, and manages an inventory of over 2,000 names. Sample names include Maps.co.uk, Mum.co.uk, Dad.co.uk, Britain.co.uk, SearchEngine.co.uk, TechnicalSupport.co.uk, EventMarketing.co.uk, Lawns.co.uk, CarNavigation.co.uk, and Charisma.co.uk.