ICANN to make big changes to internet domain suffixes

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers also known as ICANN will increase web domain suffixes. The vote was made by the global internet body to allow for this to happen.

Currently there are 22 suffixes including; .com, .gov, .edu and .org. There are also a further 250 country level domain names such as .uk. The change will allow people to summit their applications for their changes next year. It is thought that the first to take up this offer will be the large corporations. For example we could start to see a lot of this .nike, .coke, or .esso. Both Canon and UNICEF are looking to apply to get their brand name urls.

While the ideas are endless it could be hard to get the name you want. Upon application one needs to have £114,000 spare and a legitimate claim in buying the name. From the reports read however, it is unclear as to whether the money spent is solely for the application and if so, if your application is denied will your money be returned or not? Not only is this a vast amount of money, if applicants are successful they will also need to pay an annual free of around $25,000. This means that many people will be excluding from the applying due to costs alone.

The .com was introduced 26 years ago and since then little has changed. So this is a big move which is why it has been in the pipelines for the last 6 years. Not only is this change going to take place but it will include a change that will allow different languages and scripts to be used. So whereas today Chinese websites have an western looking address like youku.com, they could change it so it would be able to read something like youku.china with it all in Chinese characters. The same can be said for other languages such as Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese.

The question is; will this make life on the internet easier or not? Does this also mean that big organisations who can pay the price thrive while smaller companies get left behind? Please get in touch and let us know what you think!