Who on earth...
Is McDonald Douglas?
Despite what in the final months seemed to be stiff competition, ICANN went ahead with its new generic domain names, letting companies register .whatevertheycanthinkof from 12 January. The generic top level domain names, or gTLDs, are something that ICANN has emphasised are necessary to let more businesses onto the net in what …
> Dot brand DOES make sense
only to fools and those on *really* good drugs.
nobody really cares about what's in a domain name string any more. our google overlords give us the links to whatever we're looking for and we just don't care what the domain name part of that url is. we just click on the links and never even see the underlying domain names. game over.
you're kidding yourself if you think someone's going to type 'hotels.paris" into their browser bar. if they're looking for hotels in that city, they'll search for "hotels" "paris" and click on the links that google returns. just like they do already.
many of these new tlds will go tits-up is yet another reason why nobody will bother to remember which one(s) might be related to some city/company/service/whatever. as you said yourself, who remembers .museum? [or .name or .tel or .pro or .aero or .jobs or .travel or.... ] so why would the world need to care about or remember zillions of (here today and gone tomorrow) .whatevers?
as it is - peterspies.co.uk (for instance) - a UK company called Peter's Pies. Obviously this becomes more difficult if you are a non geographic (GlobalSuperHypermeganet) - but at least it is logical (anybody else remember when you had to PROVE you were an ISP to get a .net?)
Without structure this is going to become a pointelss exercise - people will just type the brand into google (and arguably are doing this already).
The one exception I have is .movie - do it NOW! I'm tired of seeing "SomethingAwesomeMovie.co.uk" on posters/marketing - seems like a logical place to put those.
Yeah, just like you can guess the domain name from the movie's title.
Get real, anyone looking for the site of a movie will use a search engine, or read the advert.
Of course, this is a killer argument against gTLDs generally. All the really obvious domain names went about twenty years ago. Ever since then, the only reason to have a meaningful DN is so that *after* your customer has used a search engine to find the site, they will reckon that it "feels legit". Placing it underneath a reasonable root is part of that process.
In the case of films, placing it under the studio's DN makes lots of sense because *only the studio can do that*. In point of fact, creating an entirely separate DN is stupid, because even *I* can do that. It just screams "unofficial site". But studio bosses do this anyway, presumably because they've got their brains in their dicks and pharmaceutically enhanced egos to nurture.
Can someone give me a reasonable explanation as to exactly why this is anything more than an attempt by ICANN to wring a few more dollars out of companies by selling them more domains? OK, so they have a trademark protection system in place, but which trademark system does it use? America? Europe? The World? What about voluntary websites (such as forums) who won't have a trademark. I help run one and if registering gTLDs is cheap enough, I can think of a few people who'd register one that's close to our name just to piss us off.
I doubt it'll help the consumer much either. So you could type (for example) "Megane.Renault" as a URL and have the browser jump to the product information page for the Megane, but you can almost do this now. Most browsers will use a search engine (usually Google, but it can be configured in most browsers) to search for any phrase entered into the address bar that they don't recognise as a valid URL. This also has the advantage that you can type in something that's at least vaguely recognisable as a phrase.
The average consumer would probably find it easier to type "Renault Megane" into the address bar and click a link than use a .renault gTLD.
Of course, if it really takes off, it could cause Google a few problems if people need to search less. Maybe this is the point.
It's obvious that there's still a lot of confusion and controversy around the ICANN new gTLD program.
To help stem the confusion, my company (Afilias) recently sponsored a webinar by the Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership, “Who Should Invest in a dot Brand? Evaluating the Business Case for a Top-Level Domain Name.” The webinar was designed to help businesses and brands understand the pros and cons of the ICANN new gTLD program described above. You can watch a free replay of the whole event, or just selected highlights — if time is at a premium — atafilias.info/gtld-webinar.
We also have a quick, animated overview of the program at http://youtu.be/n7zJzxwQyBQ.