Every day there seems more and more stories on the new gTLD program.
Bob Liodice the President and CEO of the ANA penned an article in Forbes. He spoke on how they were unnecessary and how they could do a lot of harm to brands and to those using the net. Read it here.
ITbusiness.ca calls it the "Wild West" and trademarks are at risk. Read it here
Naseem Javed on adotas.com called it a war, he mentioned that
"The American Bankers Association has declared its intention to apply for .bank as a gTLD brand for exclusive use for all banks worldwide. A good move, to which Liodice acknowledges that citi.bank will not be available to any outside party or spammers. He insists that spammers will attempt to get citi.sanfrancisco, and he is correct.
But what would it accomplish? “Citisanfransisco.com” is already available for a few dollars as a dotcom. There are already thousands of other citi-based names all over the world, like citi-plaza, citi-college, citi-hotel, citi-center, citi-cats, citi-taxi, citi-this, and citi-that."
The new tld program seems to be getting attention every day all over the world. How closely do domainers need to pay attention to all this chatter ?
What do you think ?
Domainers are really left out of this. I don’t think it hurts .com values.
Generic tlds matter for domainers not brands.
Let there be .geico I don’t care. .insurance is what I care about.
The gtld plane is going down faster than the titanic. Between the turmoil at ICANN, the resistance of the trademark community, the reluctance of the US government, the lengthy timeline and numerous delays, the overall habits of netizens to automaticaly type in .com, the huge finanical burden, the realistic possibility of failure AND, the fact that it has already been tried and failed with the “most in demand extenions at the time” (ie, .travel, .museum, .mobi, .aero, .biz, .jobs, .cat, .pro, .name, .info), this point is a waste of time to discuss. Nothing to see here people. Everyone move on. Continue as usual.
@Robert: Geico already has Geico.Com and has spent an incredible amount of money promoting it. You really think it will abandon its current .com in favor of a .geico? I don’t see that ever happening. And, why would they want to own AutomobileInsurance.Geico anyways, when, for a lot less money (ie no promotion needed), they can buy http://www.AutomobileInsurance.Com — especially when the latter would receive natural type in traffic and .com traffic runnoff?
If gtlds actually take place, I think they will be a novelty item like the $2 bill. Here today, gone tomorrow. Sure, a few companies may register one or two and redirect them to their existing .com, but that’s all you’ll ever see.
I highly doubt you will ever see a .brand with exclusive content on it that is not already available though the main .com.
Case in point: check out http://www.wendys.jobs . It simply goes to the .com career page. Similarly, Delta.aero simply goes to Delta.Com. Big, hairy deal.
Pepsi is already advertising urls with .PEPSI extensions.