Domain Names Move Towards Geo Targeting and Multi Languages
One of the most transcendental changes in the last forty years of Internet history is about to happen in the second quarter of 2009 after ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, approves the implementation plan to add many new names to the Internet.
At the 32nd meeting in Paris, the Board of ICANN approved on June 26, 2008 the recommendations presented by their global stakeholders to increase the opportunity and domain name choice for the more than 1.5 billion people online. These efforts have been in the works for the last 6 years.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN, said:
this is the stage of pretty liberalizing the Top Level Domain spaces and making a whole lot of new real state, if you like, on the internet available to the consumers of the world.
Geo Targeting Expansion
The plan includes the creation of city-based Top Domain Levels (TLDs) related to specific geographical locations such as:
- New York = .nyc
- London = .ldn
- Paris = .paris
- Berlin = .berlin
- Wales = .cym
There are also communities like the Catalan (.cat) in Spain or Scotland (.sco) in the UK that will greatly benefit from this change.
At the present there are only 21 TLDs that anyone can use. Among the most notorious TLDs are .com, .net and .org. Recently incorporated TLDs are .asia and .eu.
Language Expansion
Out of the estimated 6.6 billion world population, 4.5 billion use writing systems based on non-Roman (non-Latin) characters.
The current domain names structure use the ASCII code, which is entirely based on the Roman alphabet. Only 37 characters, from a group of the 128 characters the Roman (also known as Latin) alphabet has, are used in domains. These characters are A to Z, 1 to 9, and the hyphen (-).
With the inclusion of other alphabets in the Domain Name System, native speakers of Indian Languages, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian will benefit tremendously by engaging in more participation on the web. With full International Domain Names (IDNs), more people from around the world will be able to express in their native tongues by using language scripts.
Some countries have already expressed their interest in obtaining country-code Top Level Domains in their native languages. On June 16, 2008, the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made a call for the country to be assigned an Internet Domain Name in the Cyrillic script. Russians are lobbying to have what could be considered the first true International Domain Name (IDN) in internet history with the extension .?? in the Cyrillic characters, equivalent to .rf in Roman characters. President Medvedev made the incorporation of a Cyrillic domain name his personal priority as president, because of the importance that the language has for more than 300 million people worldwide using Russian.
Branding Development through Domains
Once the final plan is approved, any company or individual will be able to apply for a domain name with generic labels like .brandname or .yournamehere as long as they are able to provide a "business plan and technical capacity," as reported by BBC News.
The application process will cost over $100,000, but will remain in the lower six figures.
From a branding perspective, this will help companies like eBay extend their brand into domain names. However, trademarks will not be automatically reserved. But ICANN expects to come up with provisions to protect brand opportunity for objection on intellectual property grounds, and a national arbitration system in case conflict arises.
Other branding efforts are gear towards Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .news or .sport, which could become subject to a bidding war and speculation. There are also other gTLDs like .web, and .shop expected in the near future.
The result of these historic changes will be the incorporation of thousands or even millions of new addresses, and the integration of more languages of the world into the Internet.
