November 16, 2000

5:10 PM

ICANN announces new international TLDs
Apparently they resolved the problem of businesses buying up their domain names in the new namespaces by choosing TLDs that no one would want. Visit me at www.rattanchairs.info! My personal web site is www.ryan.name...
posted by rschram (12 comments total)

I want www.chicken.coop!
posted by hijinx at 5:14 PM on November 16, 2000

Are there really so many aeronautical companies and co-operatives that they need their own TLDs? What a terrible list. .biz and .info are the poor (or slow) man’s .com, .name is wanky, and .pro sounds like a TLD for hookers and rent boys.

I do like .museum, though, and I hope they take it further: .gallery, .library, .theatre, .cinema, .garden (for public gardens). Useful things instead of these wishy-washy choices
posted by Georgina at 5:56 PM on November 16, 2000

Pbbbt! whatever happened to .news? I worked for a paper that was really gunning for .news to arrive. I'm sure .blog or .log would've been popular. .music anyone?
.library, indeed. I second that.

Here's hoping ICANN gets it's act together and makes .gov and .mil into international domains.
posted by salsamander at 6:08 PM on November 16, 2000

The original .com & .org work for many languages too, understandable and easy to remember. Of the new ones only .info and .pro have similar appeal, the rest only work for english. I believe the original proposal por personal TLD was .nom, which works in many languages, as opposed to the approved .name, again english-centric. But anyway, why would ICANN care?
posted by tremendo at 7:27 AM on November 17, 2000

Personally, I can see a use for .biz, for the corporate home page of companies with a .com presence (since .com has lost its meaning). Like amazon.biz could be Amazon's corporate page, and yahoo.biz, google.biz, metafilter.biz, etc.

.name and .pro are pretty lame I think. .idv or something would be better for an individual site. .info I'm not sure what it even really means.

Personally, I wish they would have gone with .sucks, now that would be a popular TLD! These others I just can't see catching on. .com has too much universality and familiarity.

Oh, and tremendo, "aero" definitely works outside of English.
posted by daveadams at 8:43 AM on November 17, 2000

what possible use does .aero have for the internet? Airlines and aeronautics shops?
posted by salsamander at 9:02 AM on November 17, 2000

Oh, DOT-Blog would have been excellent. I don't understand the criteria for evaluating new TLDs. Why so few?
posted by rschram at 10:08 AM on November 17, 2000

I'd say Pyra should apply to ICANN to be registrars of the .blog domain, but ICANN requires a non-refundable $50,000 deposit to apply for TLDs, so I wouldn't want to presume they have that much spare cash lying around waiting to be spent. Or if they did, I can think of better uses of the money (why sure, I'd love to telecommute!). :)
posted by daveadams at 10:53 AM on November 17, 2000

Dot-BIZ?!?!? My proposal CLEARLY said Dot-BOZ!!!!!
posted by BozLee at 12:21 PM on November 17, 2000

Well, at least we got .name instead of .nom and .per, the other two proposals for that space.

<sigh>
posted by baylink at 8:07 PM on November 17, 2000

To me, the question still remains whether any of the new domains will work at all. Most people are so used to ".com" now that they just assume it. And then there are all the companies that buy the same name in all domains so that it doesn't matter whether you type .org, .net, or .com you always get sent to the same site. Makes it easy for lazy surfers, I suppose, but defeats the whole purpose of TLD's. A new company, faced with the choice of ".com" or ".biz" will most likely choose ".com" because it's more widely known.
posted by dnash at 10:13 AM on November 20, 2000

dnash,
Again, ".biz" has some value outside of just a ".com" mirror. It can be used for the corporate home page of a site with a consumer-oriented web presence on a ".com" site. For example, yahoo.biz could be oriented towards the business of Yahoo, Inc targeted to investors, customers, suppliers, employees, etc., while yahoo.com is the actual consumer destination.
posted by daveadams at 12:15 PM on November 20, 2000