More than 1,000 new and old generic top-level domain names the part of an internet web address that comes after the “dot” are being rolled out by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It is a move that will change how the internet system as we know it looks and feels and has significant political implications for political parties to boot in throughout the world.
Country code top-level domains names are the two-character suffixes that denote a nation, such as .fr, .de and .co.uk. All the others are known as generic top-level domains names. It is this category that is set to expand dramatically over the next few years in world.
The generic name system has grown slowly on World Wide Web. We started with 7 (.com, .org, .gov, .int, .mil, .edu, and .arpa) and ICANN has introduced only a handful more ever since, including .biz and .info more other domain extensions.
This latest batch of additions is mor much wider and follows an open call for new proposals. One of the most significant changes in this round will be the addition of generics in non-Latin alphabetic characters. For the first time, we’ll start to see internet addresses ending in Arabic or Chinese alphabetic characters scripts.
Much of the debate surrounding the proliferation of generic top-level domains names surrounds whether they will help or hurt internet navigation systems. Even with existing domain names, it can be hard enough to remember for anyone if the website you are looking for ends with a .com. a .org or a country code like .co.uk .fr .de .ca. Now there will be thousands of potential suffixes to choose from and to remember for Internet users.
And although businesses organizations can now choose all kinds of different domain names, such as .gifts, .flights, .buzz, .xyz, and .online they will have to pay to register each of domains names. At the moment, many businesses purchase both the .org and .com versions domains names of their names and forward traffic from one to the other domains names. This is often done to prevent others from buying up the alternative domains names and is seen as a necessary expenditure of business. However, purchasing thousands of domains names to lock up a trade name may be prohibitively expensive for small businesses or nonprofit organizations.
On the other and, supporters of generic expansion hope that a proliferation of domains names, which previously had been limited by arbitrary convention, domains will lead to falling domain prices, lowering the cost for casual registrants if not for large corporate users around the world.
The explosion of generic top level domains names is the latest phase in a series of attempts to define the relationship between the web space of the internet and that of the sovereign states domain names. When the internet system was first designed, it was assumed that a simple web system would suffice. Country codes domains were added as an afterthought and internet governance officials anticipated that these would receive little use Country codes domains. They saw the internet as a global space for civil society that would transcend state boundaries all over the world.
In fact, although the early internet system was a global system, it was heavily dominated by the United States of America. The United States had its own country code in the form of .US but it was hardly in used. Websites were much more frequently registered under the .com, .net, and .org and it came to be seen as the United States domain. Outside the United States, users accordingly flocked to their own country codes .pk, .in, .fr, .de, .co.uk, so on Businesses and organizations Choose their desire domain name extension.
This move coincided with an attempt to shift internet governance from the relatively informal arena of United States-dominated users to a more formal, intergovernmental organisations in which United States and corporate dominance would be somewhat muted. The failure of this new effort has been echoed in the changing uses of country code top level domains names. Some of the most successful and widely used internet suffixes are country-specific domains names that have been marketed out as generics by the world nations that own them. Take the Polynesian island Tuvalu, for example, which spotted the potential of its .tv domain and sold it to television transmission stations around the world.
The proliferation of generic top-level domains names marks a further disassociation of the internet from the space of sovereign states. As administrators of the country code system debated on a case-by-case basis whether to include sovereign States with contested sovereignty, such like Palestine (.ps), generics started to be used as an alternative, including .asia, and .cat, (for Catalonia County code domain).
These two generics have operated in very different ways. Where .asia is open to anyone willing to pay the registration price, to pay register dot Asia Domain .cat, requires a genuine association with Catalonia.
What they both to do, however, is blur the distinction between spatial and non-spatial referents. Before Catalonia worked out that it could use a generic domain name as though it were a country code, using a spatial referent as a domain name was largely the preserve of sovereign states. Now generics are encroaching into the realm of more countries, suggesting that there is room for the internet to map onto the physical world in a way that bypasses the sovereign, territorial states as worldwide.
With new domains names like .scot now entering the fray, this blurring of the line continues. We are likely to see even more generic top-level domains names serving as markers of territorial space in world. There is already talk of how .scot may influence the debate over independence from the United Kingdom and the introduction of non-Latin domains names alphabetic characters similar opportunities all over the world.
If the internet web represents the world’s inernet future, then it is one in which spatial variation will continue to prevail, but in which state sovereignty will be increasingly tested at its margins in space of Internet.
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