Tue, 13th January 2009

The End of Dot-Com

What you need to know about the new ICANN regulations.

The internet as we know it is about to undergo a dramatic change. Most of us are familiar with the standard ending of websites: .com, .net, as well as country-level endings such as .co.uk, .cn (China), and .dk (Denmark). In total, there are 273 registered character combination endings to websites, with only 37 Roman characters supported. These website endings are called top level domains (TLDs), and they are about to be opened up like at no time in history. There are currently over 150 million registered domains online, and over a sixth of the world's population online; the implications of this change could be huge. Confused already? It's no surprise. It's a complicated issue. Let's have a look at some definitions to get started.

Terms

ICANN: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers; a non-profit organisation that oversees internet-related tasks, including IP address allocation and top level domain management. These are the guys in charge of this big change.

TLD: a top level domain is the last part of an internet domain, i.e. .com, .co.uk, etc.

Historically, top level domains (TLDs) have been divided into two main groups: ccTLDs (country-level) and gTLDs (generic).

ACSII: American Standard Code for International Interchange; a text code based on the English alphabet; the most commonly used character set on the internet; 128 characters.

IDNs: Internationalised Doman Names (IDNs); a domain that contains one or more non-ASCII character.

Sponsored TLDs: "Themed" names that are restricted to those within certain private agencies and organisations (for example, .aero is restricted to those registrants in the air transport industry) TLD String: The combination of characters making up the top level domain name

Brief history of the TLD

The initial set of TLDs, introduced in 1984, was small: .com, .edu., .mil, .org, .gov. In 2005, ICANN introduced a restricted set of sponsored gTLDs, including .cat, .jobs and .travel. Last June, the corporation approved the decision in discussion, to allow a much wider set of TLDs, including non-Latin script TLDs. Under the current timescale, new TLDs could be approved as early as this summer.

Costs

The proposed cost of registering for these new TLDs is what has caused the biggest uproar. At £120,000, the registration fee will prove prohibitive for many. These costs are based on ICANN's estimations of its application processing costs and risk.

In addition, some fear bidding wars over more generic TLDs. Trademarks, apparently, will not be automatically reserved.

Possible implications

With 70 percent of the online world preferring to engage in non-English languages online, the introduction of non-Latin scripts to domain names could open up a whole new multilingual world online.

Currently, in Japan for example, numbers are often used in URLs, representing a strong Japanese aversion to Latin characters. Allowing Japanese characters in URLs will make the internet much more accessible to the millions of Japanese who don't speak or write English or any other Latin-based language. Similar implications will be seen worldwide.

It is also likely that the influx of new TLDs could increase the value of more traditional TLDs like .com and .asia. This would be because search engines are likely to give more weight to better established TLDs.