New generic Top Level Domains could led to the shutters coming down on the dot com era. By Pupul Dutta
The Internet is soon going to don a new hat. With the launch of new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) names, there will be a drift away from the dot (.) com and dot net domains, paving the way for www. and any company name, for example www.banks or www.airtel.
The development which is a result of US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decision to expand the number of gTLDs, will see corporate houses, cities, municipalities going all out to grab these new domains so as to name them after their respective sectors.
ICANN had thrown open the window for applications from global domain name registrars on January 12 this year, which was closed on May 30. Post this, ICANN publicly announced the TLD character strings that were applied for on June 13, 2012.
“The deadline for the applications was originally April which got pushed to May. According to a recent announcement by ICANN, about 1,930 requests have been received for new domain suffixes. The largest application has been made from Asia and we at Directi have applied for about 31 domain names,” said Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO of The Directi Group.
The company has applied for strings like .web, .shop, .bank, .law, .music, .news, .blog, .movie, .baby, .store, .doctor etc. “Besides, Directi, companies like Bharti Airtel, Dabur, HDFC Bank etc have also applied for gTLDs,” Turakhia said.
Currently, there are about 22 domain suffixes including .com, .net and .org (in addition to geographic suffixes), but it is expected that there could be as many as a thousand by the end of this year long process. The new domain lives are expected to go live only by mid-2013.
According to experts, the Web often faces traffic jams due to the dot com supremacy; meaning if a person searched for a doctor in Delhi, he would get a hundred results, which would not just be time consuming, but also irrelevant.
“With this multiplication of domain names, search for a doctor or a cardiac specialist would become much easier,” Turakhia asserted.
Money matters
According to ICANN, the application fee for new domain names had been fixed at $185,000. There is also a $25,000 annual fee and a charge of 25 cents per domain name after 50,000 names are registered. There will also be additional costs for maintenance to keep the registry running and monitor for potential abuse.
Directi, so far has invested over $30 million towards TLD applications under its new venture, Radix. “Companies also have to show net capital when they apply for domain names. Also, when they reach the auction stage, in case of a dispute over a particular domain name, there would be additional money that would have to be pumped in. Hence, it’s a fairly expensive proposition,” quipped Turakhia.
Impact on Indian Businesses
When the Internet first emerged, America had the privilege of eating the biggest share of the pie given the early development of the Web there. During that time, India had just begun to liberalize and was a slow adopter of technology and hardly benefited from this transition. However, with new generic TLDs, the game is expected to change for Indian businesses as well.
Turakhia said, “If you look at registrations of .com, .net and .org, you would notice that the registrations have already exceeded 80-90 million. During the emergence of the Internet, America lapped up 60% of the domain names leaving emerging countries like India with a miniscule share. With the launch of generic TLDs, Indian organizations can now register their names on the Web and not settle for the second or third best option.”
Any business in India would not only gain mileage from domain names but also an identity that would fetch them better business due to discoverable names.
However, despite all the benefits, companies that have applied for domain names need to recover their costs as well. For this, it is anticipated that these URLs will be priced steeply so as to earn a fatter margin.
According to experts, domain names can be highly lucrative, which explains the motivation of the Web giants that will likely emerge as the winners of the ‘competition’. It is believed that future owners of the .game suffix, for example, will be able to rent out the domain name, at a high price, to sites that want to use it.
Explaining the situation, Turakhia opined that, “different TLDs will have different pricing like www.bank would be more expensive as it would have more services attached with it. Whereas maybe for www.books, the pricing would be similar to .com. In any case the pricing will not be on the level of what we have paid for acquiring domain names, since, we would make money by volumes and not just one sale.”
The other factor from which the businesses would benefit is the security aspect. Security will only get better, especially for the BFSI sector, as it will deter phishing attacks. Since, banks will have their names in the URL, people won’t be easily fooled into making transactions on a fake site. “Security issues will go away completely with the emergence of these gTLDs,” said Turakhia.
