back to article Industry research claims over half of internet users open to new domains

A survey by industry group, the Domain Name Association (DNA), shows that people are open to the idea of new internet extensions, with more than half of respondents expressing a preference for new names. More than 5,000 users in 10 countries took part in the survey, whose broad methodology was also published [PDF] to build …

  1. BlartVersenwaldIII
    Facepalm

    Hmm. Methinks I need to register as many .totallysecuredefonotascamdomainhonestguviswearimnotnickingyourbankdetailsatall domains as possible.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You'll never get any non-search engine/referral traffic with that domain name.

  2. Herby

    As long as...

    TheRegister.co.uk exists, I don't think I will worry too much. Of course, we could get something like the.register as a domain name, but I'm not holding out much hope.

  3. thames

    What a load of bollocks that was

    I glanced over the "study", and it looks like the survey was constructed in a way intended to produce the desired outcome of "buy my rubbish domains". The people surveyed were given choices like "would you buy shoes from "buyshoes.com" or "buyshoes.shoes". Similar choices were presented for things like news sites.

    The reason the survey is bogus is that people were offered choices between things that they know nothing about, not choices between things that they do know. That is, they weren't offered a choice between "theregister.co.uk" and "asdf.news". I've heard of an IT industry news web site called "The Register". I haven't heard of an IT industry news web site called "asdf". Whatever top level domain name "The Register" uses is less important than the fact that I've heard of "The Register" and so have lots of other people, and it's the site that I am looking for. Having a ".news" domain name adds nothing useful to the equation.

    A "real" survey would have offered Australians choices like "smh.com.au" versus "smh.news" (for Sydney Morning Herald) and seen if there was any difference. Chances are though, that the result would either have favoured the existing domain, or been inconclusive. This of course is why that sort of choice wasn't offered.

    As for "many people type in the name of a domain occasionally" entirely misses the point as well. Yes people will type in the name of their bank, because they know what the name is. There's a big, big, difference though between "occasionally", and "nearly always". And the survey didn't even deal with the question of whether typing the name into the address bar meant the fully qualified URL, or whether people just typed "facebook" in and hit "enter" when the auto-match/search feature which all modern browsers have today came up with a choice that was close enough.

    The marketers flogging their domain "brand" are ignoring that real world companies have their own brands which they have spent a lot of money, time, and effort establishing in the minds of their customers. I don't need a ".bogroll" domain in order to find my favourite brand of bog-roll. If I don't know the URL for the brand of bog-roll, then Google will find it for me.

    The main point of these new extensions is to let domain sellers extort money from legitimate companies by threatening to flog off domain names incorporating their brands to people who will attempt to misuse it. What we need to deal with this is more robust legislation dealing with this sort of deliberate trademark infringement without requiring the victims to pay off the extortionists.

    Internationalized (non-ASCII) domain names are a different matter. Those can be legitimate. We do need better technological solutions to prevent phishing scams based on them. A good start would be for me to be able to tell my web browser to warn me about URLs which are outside of a specified character set in much the same way that they would warn me about invalid SSL certs. If I'm not familiar with Cyrillic or Mandarin URLs, chances are I won't be able to read the page contents anyway, so there's no need for me to go there unless I'm really sure about it. That would solve most problems while still letting people in places where they use different character sets have URLs that they too can read.

    1. Tannin

      Re: What a load of bollocks that was

      Every now and then, you read a comment that stands out like the dog's proverbials because of its clarity, understanding of the issue, excellent sense, and fluent, simple expression. This is one of those times. Well posted sir!

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