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How do you decide that a TLD has "failed"? Do the domains still resolve? They are obviously not going to attain a critical mass of public awareness overnight.
by extension 15y ago
How do you decide that a TLD has "failed"? Do the domains still resolve? They are obviously not going to attain a critical mass of public awareness overnight.
If startups are willing to go with goofy abuses of ccTLDs like .ly and .us then they would likely accept or even prefer gTLDs, when there is a rich variety of them available.
The domain scarcity problem will only get worse with time. Unviable options will eventually become viable by sheer necessity.
- DrJokepu 15y agoLet me illustrate how they failed with the example of the .aero TLD. When I want to visit the website of British Airways, one of the largest airlines in the world, I typically Google for "ba". The first search result is britisharways.com, not britishairways.aero. Now you can repeat the same experiment with all the other major or minor airlines, and the top search result always will be a .com (or a ccTLD) domain. This how you can tell .aero has failed; it's main target users are simply not using it.
- extension 15y agoIf you already have your .com then you don't need new TLDs. But .aero may come in handy the next time someone wants to start a new airline (which is admittedly pretty rare, so .aero in particular was probably a dumb idea). I think the succesful gTLDs will be the ones that appear commonly in trademarks like photo, pizza, sports, mart, lube, etc. It may become much more common for the domain to be the primary trademark, even for businesses that aren't particularly internet related. Fredspizza.com would be a confusing name for a restaurant but Freds.pizza less so.
- baudehlo 15y ago> But .aero may come in handy the next time someone wants to start a new airline The problem is that ICANN has already set it up so that if you have the trademark on "flying.com" that nobody can get "flying.aero" (well they can, but you can take it off them easily). So why would you even bother with the .aero domain unless you own the .com too? This is simply a money grab by ICANN.
- extension 15y agoYou make .aero part of your trademark e.g. crazyclown.aero. As long as crazyclown.com is not another airline, you should be fine.
- baudehlo 15y agoYou're very unlikely to get away with that. Try starting facebook.aero and see how long it lasts.
- extension 15y agoIf ICANN goes by trademark law, then you should be able to register something generic like friendly.aero without infringing on friendly.shoestore. If they don't then they are being stupid. If there are going to be hundreds of TLDs, you can't automatically protect every trademark in every TLD. Trademarks are not supposed to work like that.
- baudehlo 15y agoThey might not be supposed to work like that, but they do under WIPO. You can see results here: http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisionsx/index-gtld.html http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisionsx/index-gtld.htm...
- eropple 15y agoYeah, but who's actually going to do that? Apparently, just about nobody.
- praxeologist 15y agoI don't understand the situation well enough to say if it is a "money grab" or not, but it seems like another good reason to abolish intellectual property.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoDoesn't sound like a failure at all; you navigate using Google. I would assume this is typically where their traffic comes from. With that being the case it might as well not have a TLD at all; it's all but invisible to the user. The domain could very well have been .aero and you still would have navigated to it successfully. Isn't that all that matters?
- DrJokepu 15y agoOk here's another example: easyJet, one of the largest budget airlines in Europe, paints easyJet.com on the sides of their airplanes, not easyJet.aero, as you can see on this photo: http://www.easyjet.com/common/img/photo030.jpg http://www.easyjet.com/common/img/photo030.jpg What I'm saying, airlines simply don't use the .aero TLD.