If this BBC news story is anything to go by, this web address could actually exist soon. It looks like Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be allowing registration of TLDs (Top Level Domains). For the immediate future at least, I doubt it will be very used apart from the big companies (hello Google!) due to the “low six-figure” price tag (in USD). This means that web addresses could change something like this:
- http://www.google.com/ »» http://google/ or http://www.google/ or http://news.google/ etc.
- http://www.microsoft.com/ »» http://microsoft/ or http://windows.microsoft/
- And potentially personal addresses (when prices drop..) such as http://james.titcumb/
It’s certainly a revelation, but is it a good idea, thats the question… How will this be recieved by the general public? How easily will people take to typing addresses without .com or .co.uk or other TLDs? Since practically the dawn of the internet, these popular TLDs such as .com, .net, .org etc. have been a staple of the internet. Even phrases have been named after these TLDs, such as “the dot com crash” and so on.
The other extreme of course, is that it gets taken up a little too well, and it goes mad, and companies register TLDs such as in the title of this article. I’m a bit aprehensive until I read further into it, but if executed properly, I think it could work well, and would benefit the internet immensely.
On the third hand (?!), there’s the already heaving size of the internet. Capacity problems are being taken care of by the introduction of IPv6 to replace IPv4 at some point, and releasing TLDs generally will allow more combinations of domains (to a certain degree), but don’t you think there’s already just way too much information on the internet? Or perhaps there’s not enough… I think thats a whole other debate there, so I’ll put the lid back on that one for the time being.
Of course, part of this proposal is to allow non-Roman text in domain names. So instead of http://news.yahoo.co.jp/, we could see http://ニュース.yahoo.co.jp/… The problem I see with that of course, is that I don’t have a japanese keyboard, so I’d have to use character map… which would take a while. Japanese keyboards of course have Roman letters. Although to me personally, it doesn’t matter as I can’t speak or understand non-Roman languages, but I’m sure it’d matter to someone out there!
