An image from the ICANN Flickr feed, showing some of the activity at this week's event in Singapore
HostingCon 2011 takes place August 8-10 in San Diego, California. In the weeks leading up to this year’s event, the WHIR will be taking you inside the program, posting interviews and features relating to specific sessions from the program. Follow our complete coverage before and during the event at the WHIR’s HostingCon coverage feed. Click here to attend HostingCon 2011.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Earlier this week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org) approved a timeline for the creation of a wide array of new top level domains – big news that has the potential to impact the way users navigate the Internet.
As director of product management for the OpenSRS (www.opensrs.com) wholesale services brand at Tucows (www.tucowsinc.com), Adam Eisner is involved in the day-to-day of distributing domain names on a massive scale. He was also on hand in Singapore for this week’s major ICANN decision.
In an email interview with the WHIR, Eisner breaks down the meaning of the decision, and discusses the potential impact the new TLDs could have on the hosting industry, as products, and fundamentally on the way users navigate the Internet.
His answers also offer some insight into what you can expect from his HostingCon session “What Do New TLDs Mean for your Hosting Business?” scheduled to take place Monday, August 8 at 11:00 a.m., in the Emerging Trends track.
WHIR: Can you give us a bit of an overview of what exactly was decided by ICANN regarding new TLDs? Was it more or less what people expected, or were there any interesting twists?
Adam Eisner: What ICANN actually approved at this meeting was a proposed timetable for the introduction of new top level domains. That timetable has a number of important components, chief among them the Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG). The DAG, which has gone through several detailed revisions, outlines what a potential TLD applicant needs to do in order to secure their extension, and definitively describes how the entire application process will work.
I think everyone was hoping the timetable and the DAG would be approved, but to see it actually happen was a bit surreal. This process has been going on for several years.
WHIR: Can you give us a rough timeline for when some of the key points in this process will take place? When will people begin submitting their proposals? How long will the evaluating process be? When will we start seeing new TLDs go live?
AE: Right now, the timeline calls for applications to be accepted between January and April 2012. Once the application window closes, all the cards will be flipped over to reveal how many people have applied for what extensions. The applications will then be reviewed, and approvals will take place in November 2012. This sets up new TLDs to be live some time in 2013, if there are no delays in the process.
WHIR: From what I can tell, it seems like the can’t-miss implementation of this is the brand-attached TLD, like a .apple or a .bmw, whereas there aren’t necessarily any sure things in the community- or subject-related areas.
I think it depends on what you think “can’t miss” is, and that’s the interesting part. What is the definition of success for a community or subject-related TLD? Is it sales? Usage? I think this explosion of extensions is going to lead to uses no-one has even thought about yet, so I’m not sure using traditional methods to gauge success are going to work.
WHIR: Obviously, the brand-specific TLDs aren’t going to be publicly available. Since you’re in a position to evaluate the attractiveness of a given TLD to your hosting partners, do you see any really promising or intriguing products (for hosts) among the possible new TLDs at this very early stage?
AE: I see a couple of opportunities. First, some of these extensions are definitely going to be popular in the traditional sense – that is, they will register with end users as recognizable extensions which are easy to remember, and therefore be easy to sell hosting/other services with.
There are also a lot of hosting companies interested in securing their own brand. As the domain space expands to hundreds, many hosts (and brands in general) recognize at the very least there is an opportunity to secure their brand and “stand out” in what will become a more crowded name space. There are lots of measures and controls not available to a company when they only control the address “before the dot” – controlling the entire ecosystem allows hosting companies to drive all sorts of innovation.
WHIR: Do you have any thoughts on how this process could affect the role of the more established com/net/org domains, either in terms of how people look at labeling their presence on the web, or even how they look at navigating the web? Will they be diminished as an idea? Does this hurt them as a product?
AE: I don’t think new TLDs will hurt existing major extensions like .com in the near future. And I think it will actually benefit some of the smaller ones – think of extensions like .info or .biz – because new TLDs should help end users understand there are all sorts of options “right of the dot”. I don’t think that’s clear to most people right now.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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