New top-level domain name come with $100,000-plus price tag
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet global regulatory body, has announced that just anything, anywhere including individuals and commodities can now apply for and obtain a top level domain name. Before, securing an Internal domain name was a long and painful process. But ICANN rose from its yearly general meeting in Paris, France, with a full liberalisation of the Internet in order to make it available, accessible to many more people. Specifically, all bottlenecks associated with such registration in the past have been removed. It will be a free for all from now and there will be no language or cultural barriers. But henceforth, registration by such domain names will attract a fee of $100,000.
The decision was based on its stockholder’s worldwide, consultation. Scripts other than Latin which were not originally permitted on the Internet could now make free inroads into the information superhighway. These languages include, but are not limited to, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Cyrillic. If this sails through, the Internet will now be more accessible to people in the Middle East and Asia.
Until now top-level domain names— the .com or .uk at the end of a web address — have been restricted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the international not-for-profit body set up in 1998 to to oversee the structure of the internet and maintain its stability. Icann regulates the way web addresses are assigned to ensure that computers can communicate with each other.
The free-for-all agreed in Paris yesterday is seen as a great leap forward akin to the privatisation of telecommunications in the Thatcher era. Icann is not being forced to act because of there are not enough name options, but because it wants to open up the system to increase consumer choice.
Most web addresses in Britain have the suffix .uk. The most popular top level domain name in the world is .com and there are about another 20 possibilities such as .org or .net. Every country has a country code domain name such as .de (Germany) and .fr (France). Now the possibilities are endless and the new names could range from place names to commodities.
Paul Twomey, the chief executive of Icann, said: “It’s a massive increase in the real estate of the internet. It will allow groups, communities and businesses to express their identities online.”
