ICANN destroys Google's dotless domain dream Google's dream of “dotless domains”, already on the receiving end of a firm ”no” from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), has been killed off by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Dotless domains would allow web addresses like “http://search”, but would be tricky to implement without DNS …
.asia is a valid domain name already. You too can buy a domain there. It was your typical land grab with cyber squatters and shills asking for protection (sorry, extortion, oops, realy sorry, advance payment) monies for <your domain name.asia> before it launched. US$500 per domain if I recall correctly.
I certainly can't see why .gcc was refused, unless it was requested by somebody other than the FSF. .africa may have been disputed as to whom the "rightful" owner was.
Considering the quantity of internal dotless addresses put ther, it's better to avoid them.
…of course, I also think it better to avoid completely to add new TLDs, considering how little success previous entrants like .name and .xxx have had, but then I'm not trying to milk the Internet for all it is worth…
Actually .africa wasn't rejected as such, but there were two applicants for it and one of them was now rejected (presumably the other will get it, although that's not formally decided yet).
The objection to .gcc was due to potential of confusion with Gulf Cooperation Council (the applicant was Goldman Sachs, or technically their fund GCCIX WLL).
I'm sure they can get .lloydblankfeinisathievingbastard in the same way that Bank of America registered brianmoynihansucks.com.
I can only preume that Google have already managed to determine an appropriate market strategy which would give me them even more dominance, over and above their existing status, hence their request.
I give a huge thumbs up to the ICANN for refusing to kowtow to Google.
Google - They are like a semi rotten fruit, the first bite seems fine but subsequent bites really start to leave a bad aftertaste.
Even better, there's no cash back if they chose to reject your domain - so tough luck if it only lasts a few days into the process. Also, where multiple companies have applied for the same one (say .book), they all had to pay ICANN. And for the potential winners, it's like Highlander, there can be only one. I wonder if ICANN will force them to settle disputes at sword-point? Then charge massive pay-per-view fees perhaps?
Finally, for extra yummyness - and this is in no way a conflict of interest or anything (honest!) - even if you didn't enter the process, you have to pay ICANN in order to raise an objection. So if you're an innocent bystander and someone tries to take over a generic word that also happens to be your company or industry name, then you'll have to fork out to ICANN to be allowed to complain. The only concession here, is that the governments are on the advisory board, so for example I think Brazil got to object to .amazon for free.
I've no love lost for ICANN and their money grabbing ideas but I'm glad they dropped this idea. I can't imagine the number of conflicts between internal hostnames and external public domains.
Most organisation have internal websites on their networks addressed by a single dotless name eg. http://intranet
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