Canon announced Wednesday it intends to be the first company to say goodbye to .com and buy its own top-level domain, taking advantage of ICANNs decision to broadly widen the number of top-level names. If or rather when this starts happening, web address conventions may never be the same.
If successful, the global electronics giant, perhaps best know for its digital SLR cameras, will open the .canon global Top Level Domain, or TLD, as soon as late 2011. And then the dot-com revolution, still only 25 years old this week, gets really interesting: Surfers will be able to navigate to http://canon to reach its website. Canon employees could create e-mail addresses like Jim@canon.
Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as canon.com, the company said in a press release. Canon has made the official decision to begin necessary procedures to acquire .canon upon the introduction of the new system.
Of course, many (but not all) web browsers already resolve the correct site when you type just a company name in the address bar but this is the search engine working under the hood making its best guess. Typing Intel into the address bar of the latest version of Firefox, for example, gets you straight to http://www.intel.com/. Ironically, typing in Canon takes you to a Google search page whose top choice was that company, but apparently the page is not strongly enough associated with the word to trigger a Feeling Lucky choice.
ICANN hopes that opening up the name space will lead to innovation and allow for more choices for those seeking to register a domain name, given how hard it is to find a name in the dominant .com TLD. For instance, restaurants across the world called Ginos Pizza could be ginospizza.socal, ginospizza.chicago and ginospizza.westvirginia.
ICANN wont finalize the rules for landing your own TLD until at least the middle of 2011. But the draft rules say new gTLDs are only open to corporations or organizations sorry John.Abell and the application fee is set at $185,000. Fees can rise from there depending on whether people dispute your claim. If multiple organizations apply for the same name say for instance .news or .religion they are urged to work out a deal on their own, else the name could go to the highest bidder in an auction. So, good luck with that, .MiddleEast.
In an interview with Wired.com earlier this year, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said he thought that nearly all of the 100 most popular websites would eventually apply for their own top-level domain.
Companies like Canon will use existing name registrar companies that knows how to handle DNS, and are unlikely to give up their .com addresses anytime soon. But the idea of shortening URLs further will likely appeal to companies like Google and Facebook that provide public profile pages for users (e.g., http://JohnAbell.Facebook, or http://MileyCirus.Google), giving individuals who missed out on the domain land rush of the 90s another crack at intuitively named beachfront internet property.
The idea of opening new domains is hardly without critics, including some who see user confusion over the new names and who point out that e-mail validation scripts will not recognize sergey@google as a real address.
If successful, the global electronics giant, perhaps best know for its digital SLR cameras, will open the .canon global Top Level Domain, or TLD, as soon as late 2011. And then the dot-com revolution, still only 25 years old this week, gets really interesting: Surfers will be able to navigate to http://canon to reach its website. Canon employees could create e-mail addresses like Jim@canon.
Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as canon.com, the company said in a press release. Canon has made the official decision to begin necessary procedures to acquire .canon upon the introduction of the new system.
Of course, many (but not all) web browsers already resolve the correct site when you type just a company name in the address bar but this is the search engine working under the hood making its best guess. Typing Intel into the address bar of the latest version of Firefox, for example, gets you straight to http://www.intel.com/. Ironically, typing in Canon takes you to a Google search page whose top choice was that company, but apparently the page is not strongly enough associated with the word to trigger a Feeling Lucky choice.
ICANN hopes that opening up the name space will lead to innovation and allow for more choices for those seeking to register a domain name, given how hard it is to find a name in the dominant .com TLD. For instance, restaurants across the world called Ginos Pizza could be ginospizza.socal, ginospizza.chicago and ginospizza.westvirginia.
ICANN wont finalize the rules for landing your own TLD until at least the middle of 2011. But the draft rules say new gTLDs are only open to corporations or organizations sorry John.Abell and the application fee is set at $185,000. Fees can rise from there depending on whether people dispute your claim. If multiple organizations apply for the same name say for instance .news or .religion they are urged to work out a deal on their own, else the name could go to the highest bidder in an auction. So, good luck with that, .MiddleEast.
In an interview with Wired.com earlier this year, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said he thought that nearly all of the 100 most popular websites would eventually apply for their own top-level domain.
Companies like Canon will use existing name registrar companies that knows how to handle DNS, and are unlikely to give up their .com addresses anytime soon. But the idea of shortening URLs further will likely appeal to companies like Google and Facebook that provide public profile pages for users (e.g., http://JohnAbell.Facebook, or http://MileyCirus.Google), giving individuals who missed out on the domain land rush of the 90s another crack at intuitively named beachfront internet property.
The idea of opening new domains is hardly without critics, including some who see user confusion over the new names and who point out that e-mail validation scripts will not recognize sergey@google as a real address.
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