By: Raymond Hackney
Politico.com covered the new gtld program today, with comments from the ICANN Vice President of industry engagement who said,
“Even though the Internet is only about 20 years old, our minds have been programmed, for all practical purposes, to end our urls with a .com,” Namazi said. “And for that mindset to change, it’s going to take some time.”
From the article:
As the expansion process moves forward, the domain industry is pushing to raise awareness of the new options.
The largest domain-name seller, GoDaddy, is notifying its existing customers of the new endings that will soon be available. Once they are, the company plans to ramp up its advertising efforts even further, said Mike McLaughlin, GoDaddy’s vice president of domains.
Another domain-name seller, 1and1.com, launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign this fall aimed at explaining the arrival of new gTLDs. Some companies are offering preregistrations for website names on the new endings.
There are about 20 existing suffixes, dominated by the popular .com. Most consumers are familiar with a handful of other endings like .net, .gov and .edu. Polls, however, show a vast majority of Internet users don’t know about the coming expansion.
That’s fueling the public-relations push by industry. One 2013 survey sponsored by domain industry consultants found that with minimal education about the program, a majority of Internet users would feel comfortable with websites and email addresses that use the new names.
Read the full story here
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