TechRepublic.com published a scathing article on the new gTLD program.
The story is entitled “ICANN’s generic top-level domain rules cause major headaches for online businesses and confusion for consumers.”
Here are some highlights:
” In August 2011, ICANN founding chairman Esther Dyson wrote an argument against the proliferation of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), …..like .cloud, .rich, .plumbing, and for reasons that defy logic, both .black and .blackfriday. Dyson predicted that this expansion would “create lots of work for lawyers, marketers of search-engine optimization, registries, and registrars” constituting what is ultimately a “waste of resources.”
Nearly five years on, this prediction appears to have been perfect—the proliferation of gTLDs has added no value, but has lined the pockets of gTLD operators from organizations and individuals in the practice of defensive registration, and joke websites that serve no practical purpose except to highlight the ridiculousness of gTLDs, such as rebecca.blackfriday.””
The proliferation of gTLDs is a headache for IP holders that are burdened with the task of protecting their brand by defensively registering domains.
Companies are also finding themselves obligated to protect their trademarks by defensively registering websites in the .exposed, .gripe, .review, .reviews, and .sucks gTLDs to prevent others from establishing websites which may contain disparaging information about their brand, while appearing to have some modicum of authoritativeness by merit of using a company name or trademark in a TLD.
The existence of both .review and .reviews is also an issue with ICANN’s authorization process—there is no apparent protection against the creation of nearly-identical gTLDs, leading to the creation of .accountant and .accountants, .career and .careers, .dental and .dentist, .loan and .loans, among others. (an issue we wrote about before the first new gTLD actually launched in 2012)
This is a practice that potentially encourages typosquatting. Registering one without the other is effectively useless in that potential customers may be unable to find your website if the corresponding domain is not registered, or could be directed to a competitor if it was registered by someone else””
The Truth is told. Bloomberg can tell you first-hand.
Even though I am a new gTLD buyer / seller, I think that TechRepublic.com has a great point here. It’s obviously too late now, but personally I would have preferred:
1. Much fewer extensions. Maybe a hundred maximum.
2. Not very similar extensions that just adds confusion (such as .loan / .loans)
Jens
I said the same thing
Mike —
Here’s Donuts’ comment on the TechRepublic story:
What’s not mentioned in this article is the rapid growth rate of new gTLDs or the suite of tools they are built with to prevent infringement and other abusive behavior. Here are a few details your readers deserve to know:
*New gTLD registrations have surged past 16 million – including 4.4 million during February and March 2016 alone.
*Elite brands such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Barclays, General Motors, BMW, Sony, Lionsgate, Marriott, McDonald’s and Taco Bell have all put new gTLDs to use in the past year.
*Google recently clarified that new gTLDs preform just as well in its search engine as legacy domains.
*New gTLDs are built with a suite of tools to prevent abusive behavior that are not available in legacy domains. One of which is Uniform Rapid Suspension, a takedown service only required and available in new domain extensions.
The debate about whether new gTLDs are valuable is over. Businesses and consumers are embracing the choice and competition that new domains have brought to the domain space. The only headaches are for people who long for past times when innovation was thwarted and choice was limited.
That doesn’t prove their valuable. You are only justifying your supper. Anyone who says plural and singular of the same keyword are a good idea is a fool or getting paid from all ends. 20 nex extensions ? Sure. Thousands no
These companies are blackballed into attempting to protect all their ip based marks, spot on.
The framework around price increases in GTLDs does not exist m, until something is on paper, I recommend everyone to stay away.
Gtlds are just a fad, temporary lining of pockets, the stats are altered by cheap registrations out of China which cannot be afforded when it comes to renewals.
2016 the number will fall, .cloud was a show of what is to come when it comes to excessive blocking, and price gauging.
The registries did the exact opposite, of what they stated they would do. It was always about affordable alternatives, not warehousing, and premium proofing.
To this day right side has domains that cost $60,000 per year, coffee.xyz $12,000 per year lets get serious!
Esther Dyson is an astute investor. Of course her family is world renown for its contributions to science, technology and medicine.
I remember Esther at a conference in 2008 stating that Facebook would become a $100 Billion company, and 90% of the attendees thought she was nuts.
I believe her prediction about the GTLDs has been spot on: not really beneficial to users/consumers or small businesses, but a bonanza for lawyers, domain marketers and consultants, registries, registrars.
But I do believe some of the GTLDs will survive, even without the xtreme marketing tactics employed by certain individuals and registries.
.LA is not a GTLD — country code for Laos, which marketers in Los Angeles tried to adopt, but which has been a failure. This extension would have sizzled if the same team that launched .co had taken .la and used its marketing skills. Negari also could have worked his magic with .la.
As far as the GTLDs, my assessment:
1) too many
2) too many similar extensions
3) renewal fees too high
4) still confusing for non-domainers
5) major headaches for in-house IP counsel for companies, but a plus for companies like MarkMonitor
Would you rather have SmartCloud.com or Smart.Cloud, and if the latter, will there be trademark issues?
As the second most registered newgTLD, .top has a same renewal fee at about $9 for any of it’s domains.
No problem as long as Icann makes money.
Good one.
In fact, the ‘rapid growth’ (Donuts’ words) is artificial and still below expectations. We have: zone stuffing, reserved domains, domains bought by registry subsidiaries (registry selling to itself), mass speculation, spam, malware and heavy use of disposable domains.
Quality sites are rare and little known. The benefits to consumers are less than obvious.
And of course, everybody admits today that the demand is nowhere near anticipated, and that new extensions are struggling. There are too many, so they will not only be struggling but dying.
In addition the SPAM coming from New GTLD domain URLS is exploding like is 1999…
think about hundreds of .INFO all at once and bound to get worse.
before deleting SPAM emails check the urls…
Will Google do something about it? or even ISP?
I own a two-word .com, ********flights.com. The domain name receives some type-in traffic. In March it had 88 visitors.
The same two-word domain I also own as a gTLD. ********.flights. In March the gTLD version of the .com had 134 visitors. 52% more than the .com.
For more than a year the gTLD domain has outperformed the .com. My view is people are stumbling on the gTLD by accident, typing “.” instead of hitting the space bar when attempting to perform a search for “******** flights” on their mobile.
Regardless, the point is the gTLD has been more successful and has made more from parking. Often it is said gTLDs will lose traffic to the .com but I see the reverse as equally likely. I would be interested in knowing if others that own a two-word .com with matching gTLD have seen similar results. HealthyRecipes.com v Healthy.Recipes, OfficeSupplies.com v Official.Supplies, etc. – which is performing best?
interesting! thanks for sharing your thoughts
@Domain Mouse: Your input above is clearly bogus and contrived. Were it legit, you would obviously have supplied the actual urls rather than using asterisks to self-censor them. If these sites actually existed, why you not want to promote them to readers of this form? Clearly, your input is contrived, biased and a lie. Besides, who here is that stupid to believe that a version using a crap gtld receives 52% more traffic than the .com — please do not insult our collective intelligence.
Too many cooks(gtlds) spoil the soup.
All Dot com 4.net 1 .org 3.io 1.TV
@Kate
Excellent analysis. We can anticipate many registries going bankrupt.
.APP should do well, if this becomes an APP directory, and deep links providing ad revenues into Google’s coffers.
Several niche extensions, like .club, .bank, cloud, and some geos, like .nyc should do well, as they seem to have lots of support and resources.
We’ll see. I don’t have any dogs in the GTLD fight (no pun intended)
Steve
Not sure we will see registries fail
Certainly the big portfolio owners have many winners and some losers
The one off registries are rarer in general and there seems to be buyers for strings.
Even .hiv is still around although ownership has changed and Negari offered $5M cash for 4 extensions which are have a whopping 15K registrations.
Michael,
Architelos is already bankrupt. Not the first nor the last.
I don’t think they are a registry but their business model was heavily dependent on new extensions.
I think it was more that : http://domainincite.com/19140-afilias-wins-10m-judgment-in-architelos-trade-secrets-case
And they were selling registry services they had no idea how to do, manage registrar channels etc.
Kate,
It appears Architelos did file for bankruptcy. But its site is still up, providing GTLD consulting. Not sure, but wasn’t the CEO also one of the founders of .MOBI?
Michael,
It appears a lot of money was made by some registries simply by accepting payment to drop out of the bidding.
Maybe registries won’t go bankrupt. We’ll see. But it looks like many have cut back on their marketing/ad spend.
Dot-com is effectively infinite. There are 123 trillion possible nine-character dot-coms (ie. wikipedia). Trademark teams can source a creative dot-com for less than the price of a couple good office chairs. The only real problem is arrogance and laziness.
A suffix constrained just enough to support global trademark is important. Consumer security and convenience is important. Any company which believes otherwise deserves be culled. Search algorithms tar them with the same brush as the endless garbage mirror pages using these suffixes, and it’s for the best. Babymen out with the bathwater.
Somehow g5hid3m-y.com doesn’t do it for me, nor for that matter, going with a .com that fails to reflect who I am.
Why bother with a .com when I now have several exact matches under the new GTLDs
If the primary goal is to ‘reflect who you are,’ then one can use any suffix. Like, basic.tumblr.com, or irulespokane.instagram.com. But in the commercial space, one’s primary goal is ‘effective branding and trademark viability.’
Lots of people don’t cut their own hair or fix their own cars. Naming helpers are thick on the ground and cheap: http://www.squadhelp.com/branding-marketing-naming-contests/?contest_type=1.
Architelos was not a registry nor a registrar but a service provider and their bankruptcy filing is related to a law suit and a judgement entered against it
Nothing to do with the success or failure of new gTLD’s
http://domainincite.com/19140-afilias-wins-10m-judgment-in-architelos-trade-secrets-case
Brand owners obsession with the second level is imho nonsense: The idea of (most) new gTLDs is to eliminate the second level as “the only place” for the domain name and rather aims to create a meaningful phrase divided by dots.
Why the extreme panic that someone could get his hands on “{mybrand}.review”? There is nothing one can do to prevent the owner of “review .com” to create content on “{mybrand}.review .com” or “{mybrand}review .com” or “review .com/{mybrand}”.
The issue isn’t new and the new gTLDs have not changed anything: whether in a folder, top, second or third level, you can’t — and never could — block them all.
My prediction: brand owners will eventually shift from trying to occupy everything to taking down actual abuse cases only. And THIS is beneficial to everyone: there is totally legitimate use for many trademarked generic words and phrases in other verticals and regions.
Joe
– I’m not working for the companies behind .review or review .com, it just happened to be a good example
– I’m not suggesting that anyone in possession of the sample domains above ever intended to use them in connection with a third party brand
There is a choice and it can only be good for service providers and consumers.
I agree there are too many new extensions and some are confusing but when I register a name it is wise to register e.g. loans and loan this way you are somewhat protected.
Of course it also allows marketers to excel in their skills to get that high ranking regardless of many extention.
IMHO the only reason you have to pay to a registry twice (so that your .loan created traffic did not end up at loans), is a welfare program for registries. ICANN gets its budget from registries, particularly new registry applications. It has a conflict of interests. What public interest was served by creating .loans and .loan? Do you think acme.loans (of Newark) could co-exist with acme.loan (of Miami) in the space of the Internet without confusion?
Defensive registrations in net org used to be another scam. Now they killed it. With thousands of new TLD’s and unlimited more planned people and courts are going to realize it means nothing to register in a bunch of unused TLD’s. Its like Ferrari motorcars being required to stop a kid from drawing their car in school to protect their intellectual property in its name and appearance.
I think trademark owners sometimes react to much to protect their brands. If you want to make a similar website for doing a cybersquating, you don’t need new gtlds to do it. For examples if I want to make a cybersquating to TheDomains.com, I can use The-Domains.com, The.Domains.com, TheDomains.blogspot.com, TheDomainsCom.Net, WWWTheDomains.com and many variants more. The difference of trademark infringement and not trademarks infringement is the content of the website. And do you think there is anyone will check what websites are in TheDomains.sucks or TheDomains.lol ? Only if your enemy announced that he has launched TheDomains.sucks I’ll visit TheDomains.sucks. The intention to announce that must be a crime. So they are just offer reacting.