Next year the ultimate gift for the dot-COM millionaire who has everything is their own top level domain. ICANN says you can, so why not dot-DOTDOT?
For 185 Large (US) the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will sell you the rights to make up any address you like and end it with any word you like. I’m sure in the 150 pages of legal-sleaze that cement the relationship there are things that stop you using grown-up words like off.fcuk, though I think that French Connection United Kingdom should totally get a ruling on that. I mean, remember the days when any domain with the North Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe in them were banned by the Internet nanny brigade for potential allusion to Scunt (anag)?
So what does the big spender get for the price of a 1993 Lamborghini LM002? They can rip out the dot-COM from the end of their vanity URL. Why be longpassage.com when I could be long.passage? And then I would be able to sell off all of the other passage URLs to all the fellow voyagers on the Internet – the back.passage, phil.glass.passage, Carpenters.passage, secret.passage et al.
Seems a bit lame to me. The link between a site’s name and it’s URL is probably important if you’re Sony or BestBuy, but is is really worth moving the dot to the left to eliminate the dot-COM? Esther Dyson, the old founder and ex-chairman of ICANN doesn’t seem to think so. “I think it’s kind of a useless market,” Dyson said adding that it’s an unnecessary and expensive doo-hickey that is more hype than sense.
I don’t think this is sour grapes – I tend to agree. If I need to buy anvils online, I google anvils, and if I’m a fan of StoneForge anvils, then that’s what I search for. At the opposite end of the opinion poll spectrum is the chairman of ICANN’s board of directors, Peter Dengate Thrush, who said that this is “the most significant change to the Internet, really, since it was created”. Obviously he’s never played with chat roulette, hot or not, or LOLcats or whatever the cool kids are doing these days. And he stands to make a share of the 185k every time a sucker registers a new top level domain. Also, doesn’t Dengate Thrush sound like something you get from a night out with a tranny in Bangkok?
Just because ICANN doesn’t mean IWILL.