The GTLD Domain Frenzy
Are you making sense of the GTLD domain frenzy?
The media is calling it “the biggest internet opportunity since 1984” but it’s hard to understand if you are not a domain registration broker.
For the neophytes I will try to make some sense of this big mess:
GTLD stands for “Generic Top Level Domain”, these are new extensions that were recently released by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) to be used in the domain name system of the internet.
Everyone already knows of the TLDs “Top Level Domain”: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .int, .mil, .gov and the CCTLD “Country Code Top Level Domain”: .us, .fr, .it, .tv (all of the countries). Here is where some of the confusion starts, at first the “.tv” did not mean television but was for TUVALU the country, now 80% of the domain is owned by Verisign). I won’t even get into the internationalized top level domains (IDNS), and the new TLD’s .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro as I don’t even know which category they would belong to.
Returning to GTLD; the internet government, or better said the people in charge (and I have no clue who they are? ICANN, ARPA, IANA?), decided by greed that as there were no more TLDs available they would release 600+ new dot extensions like .club, .Christmas, .bar, .associates, .bid, .bike, .cards, .biz (Now this one is where it belongs even though it was released in 2000, how confusing…). Ok, you get the picture!
GREED or not, whatever the motive now we have infinite domain combinations with the new 600+ extensions. Well, but how do we manage this? Someone in my office told me: “Well it’s easy, you go to GoDaddy, choose your favorite extension and register your domain.” Yeah right, don’t bother because when you go on GoDaddy the extension you wanted is already taken, but is it really? Not necessarily because since so many registrar companies have been authorized to register these new domains without being interconnected, or simply they don’t report new registrations on time, there results a gapping doubt. Worst of all we also now have websites where you can reserve a name without really registering or paying for them, and many people are doing just that all day long. What they don’t realize is that these websites are just using them to find good domain combinations that they can after sell to someone else. Another problem is that so many big domain brokers are registering domains in bulk and not paying upfront, or paying with a huge discount per domain fee, that you have only a little time left to find and reserve your own name.
Happy domain hunting! https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db .Christmas is a great extension although I am not sure what you could do with it the other 11 months of the year?
While you're at it check out these premium domains for sale: http://onlinecommunity.info/Domains