What the new domain names could mean

There is a lot more, that the registries and registrars of new internet top level domains (like .berlin, .ngo or .ninja) need to do, to make the new names a success, said Akram Atallah, President of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) talking to the Internet Policy Review at the Munich Conference on New Top-Level Domains 2013, this week. During the conference, the CEOs of dot.berlin and punkt.at signed their contracts with the private internet governing body. Still, signing is one thing, the other is to promote the new names (e.g., cometo.berlin, love.ninja, privacy.ngo). Furthermore, beside the marketing challenge of the new names, a few process hurdles do remain.

Until the last moment, ICANN was not sure whether these babies would really be born. ICANN's CEO and President Fadi Chehade even acknowledged this at the start of the two day conference, which brings together the new TLD applicants, registries, registrars and a tonne of experts of the new TLD business. Just a week ago, the first new TLDs were pushed to the root zone of the internet and will become available after a period allowing trademark owners to secure their rights. ICANN allowed all of the non-latin TLDs to run first, in an effort to show sensitiveness towards a growing non-English-speaking internet community.

geo-TLDs: natural community, caught between different regulators

.berlin and .vienna hope to make their grand opening at the beginning of next year. Both TLDs address local communities in the first place (even if there are some obligations to have a Berlin postal address for the first) and look like easy jobs when it comes to making a successful TLD venture.

Yet, the so called geo-TLDs, of which there are much more to come, including for cities like Paris, Hamburg, Cologne, London or Zurich, in addition to ICANN's contractual obligations, have to address the policies or sensitivities in the respective cities. For instance, a gigantic list of blocked registrations is discussed for .berlin, while special privacy aspects are mentioned when it comes to Cologne.

ICANN’s standard contracts are problematic with regard to German data protection laws – plus, all TLDs have to respect a long list of rights protection mechanisms and allow for so called sunrise preregistration for trademark owners. Nevertheless, .berlin and .vienna may be among the TLDs to reach the market first.

Domain innovation for the social sector

Registrars who have been offering users to register their interest for new names in the future TLDs say that additional space provides more choice. Domain names such as .com and even some of the country-code TLD (ccTLD) spaces are rather crowded already. When it comes to additional value, new business models and even innovative use of domain names, there is a lot of optimism, but not that many practical proposals on the table. So far, according to big registrars like 1&1 or United Domains, names like .shop and .web are on top of the wish lists for new domains.

An attempt to offer their community a value-added space is made by Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .org registry which counts the Internet Society as one of its sponsoring organisations. Being the “good guys” by definition, so to speak, they intend to open up a name space for acknowledged non-governmental organisations.

Contrary to .org, where just about anybody can register, .ngo (or in French and Spanish, .ong) shall allow for a trusted space, helping to link organisations with donors – and preventing scams happening in the aftermath of human or natural disasters – at least that is the intention. For the vetting process, PIR has reached out to countries all over the globe and started to list non governmental organisations. If an NGO is in the list compiled over the last 18 months by PIR, registration of the new name is eased, according to Ulrich Retzlaff, PIR’s Director of channel management for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. If there is no match with the list, PIR will have to undertake record checks of registering organisations.

Not only shall the vetting process lend trust to the registrants. According to the programme, they will also benefit from tools developed according to their needs. For instance, while Unicef might not need a tool to allow for donations or a blogging tool, many NGOs would find them helpful.

One TLD that also wants to link donors and activists is .hiv. If .ngo has been portrayed as the Facebook for NGOs, .hiv is the virtual red ribbon.

Connecting names and services

More models are being brought to the huge shelf for new TLDs. Jordyn Buchanan, new TLD expert at Google, explained how the search engine giant will link services and names. Not only does he want the company to secure its own name space by managing its core service under .google and .chrome. He also wants to allow to cut the lengthy strings now necessary for linking to drive documents by allowing drive users to define their domain, i.e., jordyn.drive.

As in this case, Google will be the registrant. The set-up of these kinds of services implies that the user will not control his domain himself. The advantage, according to Buchanan, is that users would not be obliged to put their personal address in a public ‘whois’ database. “It would be privacy nightmare,” Buchanan said, “if Gmail users would have to publish their home address in the whois.” Still, Google has to talk through a lot of its 97 TLD applications with competitors who asked for the same string – like .cloud or .blog. And they have some issues to discuss with governments: for example the idea to put their country’s sites under the official country code-alpha 2 strings, like es.google for Spain (instead of the current google.es).

What will fly in the new TLD market is open to a lot of speculation at the moment. In one year’s time, there might be quite some disappointed applicants, the experts gathered in Munich said. Yet, they also agreed that “success“ perhaps had to be rethought. It is not about the numbers only. Nobody would match the age-old incumbent .com, Frank Schilling, founder of Uniregistry said. But perhaps this .pizza guy will do great, Tom Keller from 1&1 contemplated. And some, like the .ninja applicants, anyway do not care about the numbers, as they just wanted to be cool.