2014 is going to be an eventful year for the domain name industry, with thousands of new suffixes joining traditional extensions such as .com and .net. It’s expected that the current 22 generic top-level domains (TLDs) plus the 300 country code domains (such as .co.uk) will get company from at least one thousand new options.
The driving force of this new initiative is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which controls top-level domains. The reason for the change is to drive competition, encourage innovation, and open up a whole new market for businesses throughout the globe.
For those of you that aren’t too sure what this means or whether your business should get involved, the following will take you through everything you need to know.
So What Are These New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs)?
As we’ve already touched on, top-level domains are essentially the suffixes of your web addresses. .com, .net, .gov and .org are examples of top-level domains. While these have been tightly controlled and limited thus far, the new ICANN policy means that any domain registrar, business, organization or government body can apply to control these suffixes.
The process doesn’t come cheap, however. It will cost you a cool $185,000 to apply for control of a given suffix and you are required to have a legitimate reason to want it. ICANN will use the proceeds to cover related costs to the many thousands of expected applications.
There are endless conceivable avenues, with pretty much any word and any language being fair game for the new gTLDs. For example, some top-level domains are going to be related to a given industry. For example, law firms will soon be able to attach their company names to domains with a .law or .lawyer suffix.
One wonders whether this is an investment that the Law Society should make and control .law or .lawyer? Or, perhaps they form a syndicate with other worldwide law societies to do it jointly?
On top of topic based gTLDs you then have location-based domains. .london, .uk, .paris, .sydney, and .nyc are all going through application process as we speak. New top-level domains attached to countries, cities, districts and even neighborhoods are all distinct possibilities. .manchester anyone?
Do You Need New Top-Level Domains?
Many law firm staff have been left scratching their heads at the announcement of the new top-level domain options. The main question going around is: does your law firm actually need them?
The simple answer is that it’s a good idea to get your hands on at least a few additional options – how many depends on budget and the relevancy of the extensions in question.
One of the main reasons you want to do this is to protect your law firm’s brand. You don’t want other businesses or shady domain traders to register something that matches your company name. This may end up with you losing traffic to other websites (with people believing it to be your brand), while it could also lead to brand dilution and devaluation.
Additionally, these new domains don’t just need to be kept in the garage and sitting idle.