The Future of Web Addresses
What will common web addresses look like a few years from now? Most familiar sites today use .com, .net, or .org. Though there are technically hundreds of web suffixes available, only a few are popular. But soon it might be possible to type michael.costa or costa.photography into your browser and get to one of my web sites.
From USA Today:
The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially “generic top-level domains” — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web’s address system.
Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop.
It sounds like the flood of availability will certainly mean people trying to make money off companies’ potential web addresses.
“It costs companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to enforce their trademark rights in the existing space, so imagine how expensive it will be when Verizon gets infringed in a thousand new domains,” says Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon. “Many businesses feel this is a form of extortion.”
Will Verizon and other companies feel like they have to buy thousands of relevant addresses just to keep relative domains safe from something that could damage them? I’ll admit that I’ve thought about buying a few domains just as investments. Quick domain purchasing makes some people a lot of money. Will this change generally make domains cheaper since supply will go up? Will anyone actually use sites that don’t end in common suffixes?
