Suppose you have a business and you come up with the name "cool business #1". After careful consideration you made sure it has a nice ring, it communicates what your business is about, it is perfect. An then, you check the domain name
coolbusiness#1.com
Bummer, it is already occupied.
So are ".net" too and perhaps ".org" but the rest may be open. You can purchase ".co", ".info" and some other dots too, but it would make no sense what so ever. Most people know ".com" and completely don't care about the other TLDs. You need to make sure ".com" is free, even though perhaps you want to run your business on ".net". If your business is a local one, you might settle for a local domain, but that has its own risks: what if your business grows large enough to go international, what if an international business comes to your country and you'll be in a name conflict. There really is not much of an option.
Unfortunately there is an even bigger problem. As you reverse your naming technique and start from the domain name up, you will realize that most good name combinations are occupied, not by a legitimate business but by domain name sharks. Like real-estate sharks on the Internet, after all, a domain name is an estate in scyberland. They purchase domains by the bunch for nominal fees ($12/.com/year, or similar), and if you happen to want the domain they will gladly sell it to you for a thousand fold, or ten thousand fold, depending on what the potential of the name is. Nowadays, if you can prove legitimate business for a domain you could take it by force with a lawsuite, but who wants to start a business with a lawsuite, not knowing if the domain will be available within a month, a year or maybe three.
The TLD Scam
All in all, legitimate businesses plus hustlers, pretty much all the good names are taken. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) tried to address this by adding new top level domain names along the way. ".info", ".pro" and one that really stands out, ".co". Besides the massive marketing regarding the coolness of this latter top level domain name, it actually emphasizes the ridiculousness of these free to take added top level domain names. Let me give you an example: Suppose a legitimate business has the ".com", I will now purchase ".co" and run my legitimate business there, how will that make me look like? Well, certainly like someone who is trying to hitch a ride on the back of an already successful business, a leach in colloquial words. For this very same reason all successful businesses felt complied to purchase the ".co" the very next day they were released. Let's look at the alternative, perhaps a hustler has my ".com" domain name and I purchase and start my business on ".co". I am sure he will be thrilled, because now that he sees that I am interested in that domain name he will gladly double his price.
Instead of opening more options to people who want to start a new business, all these new top level domains did nothing more but complicate the lives of old and new businesses and gave even more opportunity for hustlers and "legitimate domain registrars" to take their money. All this based on human psychology which is hooked on the ".com" name.
In a world with limited top level domain options these should really be closed, and should function on an all or nothing fashion. For instance, you could not get yourself a ".gov", because you need to be a governmental institution to do that. This domain name is regulated and this is how they all should be. If you want a ".com" you should be able to prove you are a ".com" and then all others ".net", ".org" should redirect to your ".com". If you are a ".com" but you happened to have a branch or an affiliation that is an ".org" you now could be allowed to open up the ".org" too. This way the confusion would end. It really doesn't matter to anybody what your TLD is, they will only look for the domain name and if they can't get it right they will search engine your domain name to get to your domain but nobody pays extra effort to remember it.
Unfortunately the new generic top level domain names that come out in 2013 are no better than this. With the slight difference that they are designed to grab even more money from all those business that already run and open up a completely new way to hustle people.
In early 2013 the world wide web will be flooded with a plethora of brand new top level domain names. ".bank", ".music", ".whatever", you only have to have a truck load of money, sufficient patience and you can be the proud owner of an entire domain name hierarchy.
ICANN can even make you the registry of the top level domain name of your own business, which is really cool because now you can run your website here:
[http://]mybusiness.mybusiness
or if you don't like the repetition you can just go for
[http://]mybusiness
This is really cool because you don't need the ".com" which didn't matter any way to anyone but at least you can now pay $25,000 every year to be your very own registry instead of paying $12. Think of how many websites you could run with your business at the end; it is really an investment. But if you don't do it, as in you are not willing to pay out that amount maybe someone else will and when you are successful make an honest buck on your back. It is hustling on a whole different level, it's extortion.
But it doesn't end with the TLD of your own business. Auctions for other generic domains start around $500,000 dollars and you could also be the registry of some cool top level domain, like ".cool". This will make you a legitimate, ICANN authorized hustler. Now that you are the registry of a cool top level domain name, and after you paid handsomely to ICANN you can start to extort money out from all the legitimate businesses that are out there and don't want a leach organization to start on
"their-domain-name"."your_tld"
Your success will only depend on how well you picked your gTLD.
It really won't change anything else. Having a limited pool of domain names, people will continue paying no attention to TLDs, therefore this will only matter to those that own the business, to leaches and to hustlers.
The gTLD mindtrap
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) warned ICANN in an open letter about the dangers of what opening the top level domain name system would mean to people at large and asked ICANN to limit the number of generic TLDs to a dozen, and with good reason. Although The Anti-Phishing Working Group's statics show a decline in phishing practices in the last years, this only means that crooks have found more effective ways to con people, "for the time being". This does not mean phishing might not be back on track once gTLDs are in the open.
ICANN says that no ill willed organization will get their hands on a generic top level domain, which is most probably true. The sheer cost and time associated with the process will stop any such organization in its tracks but they don't have to. Once the generic top level domain names hit the market, basic human psychology will favor the crooks to the legitimate organizations: Up until now, the domain name has been a very strict pattern of mostly three elements grouped together with two dots:
something.name-that-actually-matters.tld
Because the TLDs are relatively few most people completely ignore its existence and automatically go to ".com", this being the most predominant one. The attention shifts then to the middle component, which is the actual name that matters, the name that identifies the business. That is really the only one component worth remembering because the leftmost element is not regulated. It can be any anything and businesses use it to categorize branches or to simply emphasize importance to some particular aspect,
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