Excerpted from "New Top Level Domains Considered
Harmful" by Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD
"Our first instincts, then should be not to change the
system with anything but incremental and carefully
thought-out changes. The addition of new top-levels
domains is a very disturbing influence. It carries
great cost. It should only be undertaken when there is
a very clear benefit to the new domain. In the case of
the proposed .mobi domain, the change is actually
detrimental.
The Economics of Domain Names
In practice, for most domain name owners, the part
between the "www" and the top level domain is their
brand, or their name. It is something they need to
protect. This means that in practice, a serious
organization to avoid confusion has to own its domain
in every non-geographical top level domain. For a
large company, the cost of this may be insignificant.
For a small enterprise, a non-profit organization or a
family, the cost becomes very significant.
The chief effect of the introduction of the .biz and
.info domains appears to have been a cash influx for
the domain name registries. Example Inc. as mentioned
above owns example.com, org and .net. Does it also
have to buy .biz, .info, and .name to avoid confusion
and the misappropriation of my name by others? Will I
have to also rent "example.mobi" in case it want to
make information available for people who use wireless
equipment?
The market for second-level domains is a market for a
limited resource. After an unstable period when the
first come first served system was in play and greedy
squatters grabbed domains simply for speculation, it
has now settled down. Introducing new TLDs has two
effects.
The first effect is a little like printing more money.
The value of one's original registration drops. At the
same time, the cost of protecting one's brand goes up
(from the cost of three domains to four, five, ...).
The value of each domain name such as example.com also
drops because of brand dilution and public confusion.
Even though most people largely ignore the last
segment of the name, when it is actually used to
distinguish between different owners, this increases
the mental effort required to remember which company
has which top level domain. This makes the whole name
space less usable.
Is it fair to reduce the value of these domains which
have been acquired at great cost by their owners?
The second effect is that instability is brought on.
There is a flurry of activity to reserve domain names,
a rush one cannot afford to miss in order to protect
one's brand. There is a rash of attempts to steal
well-known or valuable domains. The whole process
involves a lot of administration, a lot of cost per
month, a lot of business for those involved in the
domain name business itself, and a negative value to
the community."
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