Canon announced Wednesday it intends to be the first company to say goodbye to .com and buy its own top-level domain, taking advantage of ICANN's decision to broadly widen the number of top-level names. If -- or rather when -- this starts happening, web address conventions may never be the same.
If successful, the global electronics giant, perhaps best know for its digital SLR cameras, will open the .canon global Top Level Domain, or TLD, as soon as late 2011. And then the dot-com revolution, still only 25 years old this week, gets really interesting: Surfers will be able to navigate to "http://canon" to reach its website. Canon employees could create e-mail addresses like "Jim@canon."
"Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as 'canon.com'," the company said in a press release. "Canon has made the official decision to begin necessary procedures to acquire '.canon' upon the introduction of the new system."
Of course, many (but not all) web browsers already resolve the correct site when you type just a company name in the address bar -- but this is the search engine working under the hood making its best guess. Typing "Intel" into the address bar of the latest version of Firefox, for example, gets you straight to http://www.intel.com/. Ironically, typing in "Canon" takes you to a Google search page whose top choice was that company, but apparently the page is not strongly enough associated with the word to trigger a "Feeling Lucky" choice.
ICANN hopes that opening up the name space will lead to innovation and allow for more choices for those seeking to register a domain name, given how hard it is to find a name in the dominant .com TLD. For instance, restaurants across the world called Gino's Pizza could be ginospizza.socal, ginospizza.chicago and ginospizza.westvirginia.
ICANN won't finalize the rules for landing your own TLD until at least the middle of 2011. But the draft rules say new gTLDs are only open to corporations or organizations -- sorry John.Abell -- and the application fee is set at $185,000. Fees can rise from there depending on whether people dispute your claim. If multiple organizations apply for the same name -- say for instance .news or .religion -- they are urged to work out a deal on their own, else the name could go to the highest bidder in an auction. So, good luck with that, .MiddleEast.
In an interview with Wired.com earlier this year, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said he thought that nearly all of the 100 most popular websites would eventually apply for their own top-level domain.
Companies like Canon will use existing name registrar companies that knows how to handle DNS, and are unlikely to give up their .com addresses anytime soon. But the idea of shortening URLs further will likely appeal to companies like Google and Facebook that provide public profile pages for users (e.g., http://JohnAbell.Facebook, or http://MileyCyrus.Google), giving individuals who missed out on the domain land rush of the '90s another crack at intuitively named beachfront internet property.
The idea of opening new domains is hardly without critics, including some who see user confusion over the new names and who point out that e-mail validation scripts will not recognize sergey@google as a real address.
Trademark holders like CocaCola fear they will have to battle domain squatters in hundreds of new domain and argue that "fraud and abuse in the system as it currently exists ... will be amplified by the rapid addition of new gTLDs." Coke suggests that brand name TLDs should wait until after more generic names like .restaurant are tried out, while other trademark holders see no reason for the new names at all.
Perhaps even more dangerous are fights over contentious domains like .religion or .muslim, which could land ICANN in deep political fights that it has tried to stay clear of in order to remain being seen as a neutral, standards setting body that only controls the net's naming architecture.
Already, the proposal to establish .XXX has caught ICANN in a political battle. The proposal, which would create a top-level domain for pornographic sites without requiring all such sites to use it, was initially approved by ICANN. But after religious groups in the U.S. protested, the U.S. government threatened to keep .XXX out of the net's root file, which would force a showdown over ICANN's independence. (The Commerce Department approves the root file every day, though that's usually a formality). ICANN then revoked .XXX, only to lose an arbitration proceeding in February, forcing it to reconsider its decision.
The final rules for the first round of applications have not yet been published, but they will likely be quite similar to the current draft. Those rules require a hefty deposit, a thorough vetting of the name and the sponsoring organization and a public "Expression of Interest" to let the net community know about the proposal. Trademarks will be taken into account, and given the price, it's unlikely anyone will try to snag .IBM unless they are actually IBM.
But in some ways, the move might not be necessary, since a cool URL isn't as necessary as it used to be. Given that many users use search engines to navigate (typing Yahoo into Google.com's search box, for instance) and that many browsers now let users search on words directly from the address bar, it's increasingly irrelevant whether users remember your URL or not -- so long as they remember your company's name. This could get complicated, however, if someone registers .plumber. What will browsers do in the case that someone types "plumber" into their browser's address bar?
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