For years the .com domain space has had great importance and kudos in eCommerce, but that's all about to change. Soon you may be able to register homephone.plusnet, snapcrackleandpop.kelloggs, house.channel5 or even i.phone. This is because ICANN are currently nearing the completion of their gTLD domains proposal that will allow you to register additional generic top-level domain (gTLD) names rather than being limited to the existing set of TLDs, such as .com, .org, .uk etc. Registrars would need to support these domains so you won't necessarily be able to use your favourite domain provider to register one, but it may actually be possible for a company to act as registrar for its own gTLD. An article by InfoWorld explains the concept in more detail. At an expected minimum $100,000 gTLD registration fee, you'll need lots of money and probably want a very good reason to register one for yourself. Instead you'll likely see many organisations registering a gTLD and sub-letting (in a manner of speaking) their domains. So, an organisation may register the phone gTLD and let the likes of Apple register an iphone domain and Nokia an n95 domain. There are some concerns about domain squatting and how this could worsen under these plans, but I personally don't see this as a good enough reason to stop this moving forward - although I'm sure some squatting controls would be appreciated by all those who've tried to register their dream domain only to see some "entrepreneur" has parked it for you to buy at their reasonable price. Additionally there's concern regarding whether this concept would just cause consumer confusion. What would someone like Tesco do (a very random example I have just come up with)? tesco.com, tesco.co.uk, tesco.supermarket, tesco.shop, tesco.grocery? It could certainly get messy and expensive. What do you think? This has got me thinking about what gTLDs I'd like to see registered. Well, maybe .cake would be at the top of my list and .gadget a close second, but what would you choose? Add a comment to the blog with your choice of gTLDs, and also let us know whether you think the whole concept will succeed (and why/why not). Dan
