Ask someone to name a website and it’s a virtual certainly they will say something ending with “dot com”: Amazon.com, eBay.com, Facebook.com, it doesn’t matter what, it’s the same suffix. Dotcom is the internet for most people.
But that may all change next year when the top level of the net - the part after the dot - is liberalised. From 2008, anyone wanting their own piece of the internet is welcome to apply for it. It won’t be cheap (there will an application fee of around $100,000) and it won’t be simple (you have to prove you are capable of running a complex piece of the net’s infrastructure) - but it could mean a change in the way the online world works.
This article for example may appear on www.guardian.news, rather than guardian.co.uk. Or perhaps at www.technology.guardian. You may have clicked through to it from http://latest.google, or from someone’s personal.blog address. You may be reading it in a cafe you found on www.uk.coffee. The possibilities are seemingly endless, but despite two limited extensions of the internet’s top-level domain space in 2001 and 2004, no one - including the experts - is sure what will happen this time around.
While may be true the bottom line would be more extensions, more traffic to the .com correspondent. Say Guardian.news become a hit, then there will be traffic leakage to the .com version, and to guardiannews.com as well.
Should businesses start using other extensions? Sure, but they need to take into consideration the cost of acquisition is higher then the traffic that come to their site, because of leakage. To those who overlook that simple part, they may end up paying dearly, as topix.net had, and many others.
More extensions are like more flavors of ice cream. Ask someone to name 3 flavors right off the top of their head and they like will say: “Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry.” Yeah Mocha Chip Swirl might be a tasty flavor but the majority do not think of it first.
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Never thought of it that way.. good analogy there.