New Domain Name Confusion 

For Domain Name Registration Pricing and Details click here

To start to sort things out a bit let's look at the new names individually:

.biz, is it any different from a .com? Absolutely not other than it is supposed to only be for businesses. Cyber squatters will be looking to pick up the .biz extension for popular business sites. Imagine what Amazon.biz would be worth? Hopefully existing domain owners will be given first chance to protect their name.

.info can be registered by anyone. Imagine you have a site www.yourdomain.com. Someone comes along and registers www.yourdomain.info. How can this reflect on your site, especially if they run an adult or trash site?

.name is the first of the poor choices for new TLDs and the quality just goes downhill from here. Only one person can register www.johnsmith.name. So who has the right to it when there are thousands of John Smiths? Should all site owners have to register the .name extension for fear of a competitor picking up MSN.name?

.pro is supposed to be only for licensed professionals such as lawyers, doctors and accountants. Which professional will score Yahoo.pro?

.aero, just how specialized do we have to get? What about .train, .boat and .car? Why just the aviation industry? Could they have the biggest budget? Icann has opened the door for a flood of TLDs that will soon saturate the Internet and make TLDs virtually worthless as they won't mean anything.

.museum, it just gets worse as promised. What is so special about museums? What can't we register .hospital, are they less important than museums? The point of this article isn't to pick on any one TLD, it is just to show how out of control the whole process has gotten.

.coop, obviously non-profit cooperatives are vital to the New Economy and the Internet as a whole? If you register www.chicken.coop please let me know, think of all the possibilities!

As you can see the most important thing depends on whether anyone can register these domain names or if they really apply some restrictions. Otherwise site owners are going to feel obligated to reserve seven new domain names just to protect their reputation.

Frankly this just seems like a cash cow for domain registrars praying on webmasters. They are the ones really profiting from the new TLDs.

To finish off here are the answers to the FAQs we've received:

When can you start registering them?
Probably not until the second quarter 2001.

Is pre-registration a good idea? 
Direct quote from Icann web site:

"No one has been authorized to "pre-register" domain names in the new TLDs. Persons who attempt to "pre-register" such domain names do so at their own risk and with no assurance that they willreceive the pre-registered names once the TLDs become operational. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently issued a consumer alert warning about "scam artists" offering services along these lines. Among other recommendations, the FTC advised consumers to protect themselves by "[a]voiding any domain name pre-registration service that asks for up-front fees, guarantees particular top level domain names or preferential treatment in the assignment of new top level domain names." 

You can try to pre-register but there aren't any guarantees. If you do pre-register make sure you only pay on confirmation of the registration. I hope this helps with some of the confusion, don't get carried away and blow your budget on seven new domain name registrations. Have your web site make the profits for you re-invest in protecting your name by registering the additional names if you want but expect even more TLDs to come, it can and will get expensive!

Happy Marketing!

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