A daily digest of IT news, curated from blogs, forums and news sites around the web each morning. We highlight the key commentary and demystify the real story.
ICANN can now allocate new top-level domain names (TLDs). It's announced the list of new "Internet suffixes" applied for in its much-delayed process. And there are some surprising entries. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers boggle at ICANN's $352 million application fee windfall.
By Richi Jennings: Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Not a Photoshop disaster...
How many does Peter Sayer say there were?
1930 applications to create and operate new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ... "google" was claimed by...Google, along with..."android", "gmail," "page," "play," "search," "store" and "youtube" [and more]. ... App was applied for by 13 companies, including Amazon...and Google.
...
Amazon, Apple, Google, HTC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Samsung were among...companies seeking to register their own names. ... City and state governments have sought registration. ... 116 of the applications are...written using non-Latin scripts.
Charles Arthur fears those evil, evil corporations:
Those put in charge of allotting such domains will have complete power...so that if Amazon was to control .book, it could deny a rival such as Waterstones the chance to create waterstones.book.
...
The new...TLDs will start to come online in the first quarter of 2013...which cost $185,000 per registration. ... [ICANN plans] to process the applications in batches of about 500...[and] take about 18 months to process the entire set.
Still .confused? Your humble blogwatcher tries to help:
Yes, registrants with deep pockets need no longer feel restricted to the familiar .com. ... Neither need they resort to the slightly weird use of country-codes...such as those owned by Tuvalu (.tv), the Federated States of Micronesia (.fm), or Armenia (.am).
But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols calls it bull****:
The delusion...behind this is that there’s a pent up demand for more TLDs. ... People want .com addresses. ... [Do] they really want...an .ASSOCIATES or .BUSINESS? I don’t think so..
...
ICANN...claims that these new TLDs will benefit users by creating...competition. I can’t see it. ... The TLDs that would-be domain TLD millionaires are going to fight over...have the same problem as .BIZ. They’re not .COM.
...
[They're] going to be a waste of time and money.
And John Paczkowski follows the money:
Meanwhile, Peter Rojas is more succinct:
[As] far as I can tell the only people that benefit are registrars and domain squatters.
