The following was a reader’s response to the article yesterday about my feelings regarding Frank Schillings new registry and TLDs he’s applied for. I think they are all very valid points and lay out pretty succinctly the problems all new tlds will face. Here’s the comment.
I disagree with Schilling and you. I can’t think of another time I have disagreed with him, but truthfully there are so many holes in using these new TLDs that they will get shunned and people that use them (besides .BRAND) will look clownish and amateur.
Faults include:
1. People having the .com equivalent getting your email using their email catch all. So my.dog might lose their emails to dog.com. This can devastate a business if a competitor gets those emails.
2. So far, with the famous O.CO example, we have a 61% traffic leakage to O.COM.
3. Less trust as documented by Microsoft:
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf
4. Lawsuits, UDRPs, domain fights
5. Massive branding confusing and lost business.
6. Registrars that can raise your domain renewal fees to whatever they want.
7. Restrictions. Some that have to do with a trademark clearninghouse for domains where you agree that your domain does not violate any trademark in any country in the world. Who would agree and buy a domain if this is force on you?
8. What if the TLD is not successful? Will it close and will you lose your domain? Who will run the failed TLD? Who wants the loser?
9. Many .com domains will actually make more money off the efforts of those building out their TLDs since traffic leakage is going to the .com
10. I’ve never sold a domain to anyone on a .net that was looking to put six figures into the domain for development. Will enough companies jump on .web, which is being hawked as probably being the most successful ones coming, to actually make the TLD successful for the domain owners on a whole?
If you had a 1M to invest and build out a domain, would you choose a .com or a new TLD? The answer for most is .com.
If you say it opens it up for others. Well, fine. It does, but so does .info, .biz, .mobi, .tel, and they all failed really. Those are relegated to the poor, misinformed, untrusted lot that use them as their business websites. I don’t trust those extensions for purchases. Do you?
These are only 10 reasons. I’m sure there are plenty more.
i agree with these will all fail and .com will get more traffic general will better prices.
Other reasons you forgot to mention…
11. All the big brands in the world already use a .com and 98% of them won’t spend the money to rebrand and change billboards, commercials, business cards, stationary, etc, etc. Thus .com will remain the “gold standard”
12. .com is already ingrained in end user’s minds. When more money is in .com development, you will typically see better sites and better content on .com addresses
13. To use a .goof address you will have to go to XYZ registrar. To use a .more address you will have to use a totally different registrar.
14. The United States Department of Commerce has not awarded the renewal of the IANA contract to ICANN, and even rejected it’s last proposal to manage IANA functions – which are necessary to add more extensions to the root. This “big reveal” could lead to nothing if a more responsible organization takes over IANA functions in a few months time when it goes out for re-bid.
15. Some TLDs will become “bad neighborhoods” for search engines – just like .info has become. Do you trust having your brand in a new neighborhood and potentially being judged by your neighbors behavior?
16. Variable pricing… New registries will be able to charge your neighbor $10 per domain per year, and you $5,000 per domain per year – just because you have more traffic or a more “premium domain”. Do you trust your registry provider to act ethically? Especially when they are about to go bankrupt and need the money to pay their bills?
17. Lots of everyday people will fall into the fools gold rush, buy a lot of domains in these new extensions hoping to make money, only to later find out they were fools. This will hurt the perception of new extensions in 2 to 3 years time.
18. ICANN is taking a one time shot with this. If this expansion fails this time around, it will have a negative stigma forever and could be the last gTLD expansion we see for a long time – unless ICANN feels it needs to raise more money again to support it’s lavish parties.
19. Because all the worst extensions (non-contested extensions) will launch first, and the better extensions will be held up in negotiations, legal suits and auctions for years. Therefore people of the world just won’t understand why they need .lol or .dog.
I was thinking about #8 a few days ago. You can build a business on a new gTLD but who will guarantee you that particular gTLD will be available for the years to come?
So far, we have been looking at gTLDs as strings whose existence in the Internet for the (remote) future we have taken for granted. But now we’d better look at these new extensions more like domain names (that might be dropped at a certain point) than TLDs as we know them.
I really think the international angle is key here and is overlooked in the listing of these 10 points. Since Verisign applied for transliterations of .COM in Russian/Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Thai, Arabic, Korean/Hangul and Hindi, accessibility to non-English speakers (or typers) is opened up.
The more I look at new TLDs, the more I like .com.
All solid points.
My take is that the private TLDs will do well because they are in-house brands, but the generics will find that convincing the public to buy/brand will be incredibly difficult and many will fail – which will make people wary. And all of those saying this is the beginning of the end of dotCOM need to put down that glass of Kool-Aid.
These are 19 excellent points.
I think that ‘intuitively’ this whole program just feels ‘wrong.’ There’s not a single person I know who’s told me that they are excited to register _____.widget, etc.
There are two categories of players who get excited about domain names in general: (1)Investors/speculators, most of whom are just to shrewd to buy-up blocks of ______.widget names, in the hopes of flipping them; and (2) developer/marketers, most of whom are just too savvy to build a brand atop something so tenuous, and operated by 5-man firms whose long-term viability is questionable, at best.
Even if you point to all the money flowing into some of these firms (as has been over-reported), that’s no guarantee of anything. Just ask the investors at any of the thousands of companies in the startup deadpool. In fact, the more money that flows in, the more the hubris, and the dumber the moves these ivy league founders seem to make.
Someone needs to launch a deadpool on gTLDs…especially one where prizes are given out to the winning fortune-teller regarding termination time frames.
Completely agree with your reasoning. But one of the biggest in my mind is the following:
Every single .gTLD can be expressed as a .COM (in fact, the vast majority ALREADY exist in .COM … and not just the generic word, but also the keyword combos that will be created on the gTLD’s).
However, every .COM or name/company/phrase yet to be created CANNOT be created as a gTLD. Only the limited number of gTLD’s (1500 or so) created/ in existence can be used, and those will have restrictions and most will never come into being. There are millions of words, millions more word combos, and companies around the world …. they just won’t be possible as gTLD’s.
But anything can be built on .COM. Any word, any company name, and it doesn’t matter the industry or subject matter.
It’s just so obvious if you really think about it.
Car.shop … CarShop.com … Tax.Lawyer … TaxLawyer.com ….
But BrandableWord.com … BrandableCompanyName.com … CommonLongPhrase.com … these aren’t going to make sense on gTLD’s
And the ones that DO make sense as a gTLD already have .COM’s. It’s straight by the potential numbers.
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I sure would like to get one of those. Lol addresses.
LOL
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Sorry I’M writing this from my KIndle.
I agree with many of the naysayers.
Big money will win. Brand gtlds will win. The rest will fail. But it’s easy being an armchair commentator.
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In the my.dog and dog.com example there will be a lot of people typing in third level domains.
They will make the mistake of my.dog.com instead of my.dog. This is huge!!
I think #19 is very enlightening. It is a very good point. The best TLDs will be delayed for a long time allowing the less desirable ones to go first. This is a big mistake.
dot web might become popular, but in this category dot net will be king 😉
Reason 101 – Google will kill any gTLD that has a chance to be successful. Say .law gives every lawyer LastName.law and lawyers actually start using these gTLDs. So consumers end up being trained that they can just go to LastName.law to go to the website of any attorney. (The above will never happen like that, but let’s just assume).
So now all these people are going to attorneys directly instead of searching in Google. BAD for Google.
Google will only promote gTLDs exactly as much and as little as to only muddy up the waters and to confuse people more. The more confusion, the more people use Google.
This is Great. At first I was against all these new extensions, but now they are being such Pigs by issuing so many that it is going to do the exact same thing for the .Com as if it was the only extension allowed.
Increase their Value!
Universal Time of Chao is coming …
What workaday domainers so often fail to acknowledge is that *THERE ARE ALREADY 300 TLDS*.
Kevin,
What is a “workaday domainer”? Is Thanks for the info. Typical journalist, trying to bring real facts into a vibrant conversation. You’d be no fun at a party :).
Just meant the average domainer.
I’m terrible at parties. Usually either arguing loudly about religion or sobbing in a corner.
Kevin,
Me too, I fall asleep at 9pm, an hour after the part starts (that would explain our thread here at 4:45 am my time).
@Kevin
Please next time try to speak a little louder 🙂
I’m rarely a CAPPER, but sometimes you need to yell to be heard above the repetitive clamor of people proclaiming .com to be “king”, as if it’s somehow the ancient wisdom of the oracles.
People having the .com equivalent getting your email using their email catch all.
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This guy knows his shit.
Henry Winkler now does commercials for One Reverse Mortgage.
My email gets DELUGED with people signing up for that service- using their real information- but for whatever reason, don’t want to give out their email address so they coyly enter an email that happens to match an email I use.
I have no desire whatsoever to engage in anything underhanded so I just delete them, but yes, those people are goddamn lucky I’m an honest guy. They have no idea they basically just sent access to all their personal information to a very real person.