Small Businesses Will Have to Wait A Little Longer for New Top Level Domains

By Statton Hammock

Two weeks ago, during its tri-annual meeting in Seoul, South Korea, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) disappointed many meeting participants by stating that that the timeline for accepting applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) would be further extended, thus delaying any offering of new gTLDs until at least the fourth quarter of 2010. This means that new small businesses will have to wait a little longer to register a useful domain name having an extension such as .web, .flowers, or .Texas.

Earlier this year, Ben Worthen, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, wrote an interesting article describing how new businesses already have to settle for very wordy web addresses with a .com or .net because all of the succinct and descriptive addresses in these TLDs are already taken. For example, today John Smith may be forced to register a domain like “JohnSmithshoestore.com” for his business in order to get a web presence. With new gTLDs, however, John might be able to register “Johns.shoes.”

ICANN has slowed its forward momentum for new gTLDs because it believes there are technical, economic, legal, and policy issues that still need to be resolved. Admittedly, some of these issues must be resolved rather quickly such as additional rights protection for trademark and brand owners. Others, however, can be resolved concurrently as the process moves forward such as the scalability of the root system. Unfortunately, ICANN has not proposed any timeline for resolving these outstanding issues. Without any timeline to spur action, these issues could continue to linger for months. Not only will this delay negatively impact the many startups hoping to offer new TLDs to the market, but it also will undermine efforts by small business owners to secure short, meaningful and memorable domain names for their businesses.

Small business owners may have to wait for new gTLDs but they don’t have to endure the delay in silence. ICANN is currently accepting public comments on the latest version of its Draft Applicant Guidebook. The deadline for comments is November 22, 2009. Go online and urge ICANN to set deadlines for resolving the outstanding issues so that new gTLDs can be made available.

Statton Hammock is Sr. Director or Legal & Business Affairs at Network Solutions. He monitors ICANN policy matters and issues affecting Internet governance.