Thursday, June 26, 2008

More Domain Names...?

The ICANN votes today in Paris on whether or not to approve new domain name extensions from .com and .net to dot anything. Both CNN and the BBC are following the story, but I’m wondering if this will really be a benefit to consumers. Sure brands will be able to buy out their names (at highway robbery prices) and use them as extensions, but in a world where most people have to look at their cell phones to rattle off any number other than their home or next of kin; won’t this just confuse the issue? If this goes through, I see a boom in linking services, search engines and bookmarking tools.

Another issue is lack of space to accommodate the massive growth of the Web, which expanded by 3.9 million domain names just this month according to Netcraft. It’s tough to argue with finding space for all the new bloggers, printers and VoIP phones on the block, but currently there’s 4,294,967,296 available IP addresses. This data, reported by the Korea Times (talk about sourcing fringe news), indicates that there are only 0.7 available IP addresses for each person on earth. The new system would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion new addresses. Now that's a lot of growth.

1 comment:

John Lovett said...

On Second thought...doesn't this mean that .com extensions will be the coveted retro urls? I've kept my 617 prefix on my phone in Boston because it's way cooler than 781. NYC values its 212 and just try to snag a 415 prefix these days...

What do you think?