Starting your own TLD
Posted on | December 29, 2008 |
Have $185,000 lying around? If ICANN’s latest plans come through, you may just be able to start a new Generic TLD registry. After about an year of discussions between ICANN, U.S. Government and the community, US government has called the new gTLD plans a real stinker.
After the recent launches of arguably useless top level domains like .tel, .travel, .museum, .jobs, .aero and many others, ICANN is betting over demand for providing any generic word as TLDs, provided that you give them $185,000 as registration fees and another $60,000 towards yearly maintenance charges.
And everyone thought that ICANN was a non-profit organization, which was given the responsibility of regulating the domain name space. While the argument that a lot of good domains in .com/.net are either already registered or are being held hostage at domain parking sites is valid. But creating altogether new TLDs may not necessarily be the best solution. A lot of users still guess the address of websites by adding .com at the end.
What this may end up with is, forcing the existing website owners to register their trademarks with several TLDs just to keep a check on their trademark abuse. Also, there is no estimate on how the introduction of about (say) 10000 new TLDs will affect the fragile DNS system.
What’s your take on this?
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