Domain name expansion taking wrong track

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 12:33

Opinion and Analysis

One of the justifications for a massive expansion in the number of top-level domains is that "the stock of available web addresses under the current protocol [is] set to run out by 2011". I ask: whose fault is that?

That quote comes from an AFP report that ICANN is considering allowing the creation of many new top level domains. You may want to read our own Davey Winder's take .

The perceived shortage of domain names stems from various decisions that were made when the Internet made the transition from a academic and research network to a commercial model.

Those who wanted to see the domain name space treated as a public resource that should be conserved were effectively overridden by those who wanted to strip-mine it for profit.

An example of this can be seen in the liberalisation of the .com.au space, which is still one of the more heavily regulated domains.

Originally, a .com.au domain had to be closely derived from the company name or business name of the enterprise seeking to register it, and there was a list of reserved names that were considered too generic for use in this context.

And strange as it may sound, there was a limit of one domain per business. The idea was to encourage the use of subdomains. So rather than allowing a publisher to register separate domain names for each of its newspapers, it would use subdomains instead.

What's the big attraction of .com? Please read on.