ICANN Launches Generic .dot Addresses for Any Legal Entity

B. Ostergaard

Summary Bullets:         

• The Internet address universe is expanding.
• New security challenges must be weighed against giving customers a more personalized experience.

After six years of debate, ICANN, the Internet global domain name manager, has thrown open the gates and set the price bar ($185,000) for any legal entity to acquire its own generic top-level domain name (gTLD).  Examples include company brands and geographic locations below the country level (typically city names).  These also include suffixes using non-Latin and non-ASCII characters, specific product category names and general activity terms such as sports or .music.  This can become a real cash cow for the non-profit ICANN, which expects to receive between 1,000 and 1,500 applications: about two-thirds for ‘dot-brand’ gTLDs such as Hitachi (.hitachi), Canon (.canon) and Deloitte (.deloitte), and 10% from .dot cities such as London, New York and Las Vegas.  However, the TLD universe has been expanding for some time now.  In 2009, ICANN launched IDN (internationalized domain name) TLDs with non-Latin alphabets (the first being a group of Arabic names for the countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).