the New Domain Name Rules

Just a few months ago, the domain market seemed like it was headed in a direction it has been since the internet was founded by Al Gore in the 1980's (The Al Gore part is a joke). Just a few days ago though, ICANN, which is the non profit organization responsible for overseeing domain names as well as their registration, voted on and passed a new document which will direct the domain industry in a new, more exciting, but also possibly confusing direction. Until now domain owners only had a handful of extensions to choose from. .com, .net, .org, .biz, .bz, .mobi, etc. But now ICANN will allow companies to claim their own Top level domain extensions. For instance Google could buy the .goog extension, and instead of people registering domains like, Brian dot com, they could now register Brian dot goog.

Problems:

Although this is great for people who want to register domains but find most of the ones pertaining to their idea, company, or website to be taken, most internet surfers will become confused. If you see a commercial for Coca Cola that says, "visit our website at my.coke, most people will likely instead goto mycoke dot com, or my dot coke dot com. The .com extension seems to eternally be stuck in people's heads as the one of choice when typing in a url. With the possibility of thousands of new extensions, the internet may become even more confusing to those who don't spend 8 hours a day on it like myself.

What Happens to the Value of Domain names?

In the past it seemed that domains would be relatively limited to a handful of extentions, however this has all changed. Will the values decline since the supply of names will increase dramatically? This is a tough question, but in my opinion I would venture to say that the .com domain sector will continue on a path of double digit percentage gains for quite some time. Why? Because with more confusion among web surfers, more people will simply goto the .com version of a domain if they are unsure of an address. I also feel that .net, and .org's will hold their values, and the country code TLD's that are popular such as .co.uk, and .de will also continue a steady upward trend. Extensions that will decrease in value possibly, or at least not make significant investment opportunities are those such as .bz, .travel, .biz, .asia, and a few others which really are no better off then the new extensions which will soon be offered.