Cash Peters Has It All Wrong

Cash Peters, a writer for American Public Media wrote an article today explaining how the business model for domain names is about to change.  While Cash Peters may be a very good tech writer, he certainly doesn’t understand domaining.

He starts out the article like every article from an outsiders point of view.  “Every domain seems to be taken, and I hate it”.  Then he proceeds to say this is all about to change.  And here’s how Cash thinks things are going to be fixed

Extend the number of top level domain names — from your basic dot-coms and dot-orgs — by adding tons more.

Here’s a quote from the article

Doug Brent is COO of ICANN, the Internet… Corporation of… Anyway, they oversee domain names.

Doug Brent: In the physical world, when you have beach-front real estate, there just is that limit. There’s going to be competition for the beach. It doesn’t have to be that way in domain names.

Over the next year — perhaps longer, but maybe in that time frame — basically, anyone could apply for a top-level domain name. So instead of dot-com, it can be dot-my-brand or dot-my-community, like the dot-Inuit community. Or perhaps dot-Facebook. The feeling that all the good names are taken doesn’t have to be true anymore.

Great. But uh-oh, wait. If you add these new names, what happens to all those greedy opportunists who basically registered the entire thesaurus to make a fast buck? I do hope they’ll be OK and don’t lose all their money.

Tantillo and Peters laughing

I don’t know why that’s funny, it just is. But really, they’re in for a shock.

Sarno (David Sarno’s the tech reporter for the L.A. Times.) : You’re going to have a whole lot of people who have paid a whole lot of money for codes that don’t mean anything anymore. And it’s going to be replaced, and everybody that paid money for a piece of that system is going to be out of luck.

Oh, darn. In short, the whole system’s about to become freer and simpler

That’s right ICANN, the greedy overseers of the pump and dump new tlds is going to make finding domains better.  Sorry Cash, you just explained why dot com has become so much more valuable.  All the new tlds become confusing.  Sure you can have trees.organic some day but people will most likely think trees.com or organictrees.com.   The rest will be personal sites, email addresses, or “close enough” sites.  I say close enough because they would like to have the dot come but can’t afford it so they’ll have to settle. If people were happy with name.facebook.com type pages then everyone would still use blogspot.com. And the last time I check the only site still left on it is Frager.