Queen, or prince, or court jester????All the "Dot com is king" messages are, in
my view, coming from a flawed mindset where people believe one of the TLDs has to
"rule" over all the others. Or, to shift metaphors, the TLDs are all in a horse
race (the sport of kings) and one of them has to win, a couple of others will place
and show, and the rest are also-rans.
If you instead think of the TLDs in the mindset
under which they were actually created, they're not in competition; they're simply
different logical parts of a namespace serving different purposes.
.com is for
commercial entities
.org is for noncommercial organizations
.mil is for the
U.S. military
and so on. Some, though not all, of the new TLDs are being
created in exactly that vein; .museum is for museums only, and is not in any way
competing with .com. Similarly, .name provides namespace for personal users,
something not present in the existing TLDs -- it's not in any way trying to get the
marketing types or speculators to think that "dot-name" is the hot place to make
big bucks on the Internet, just to provide individuals a sensible address on it.
With
.biz, it would be more sensible to view it as competing with .com, since the target
user base is the same, though it alternatively could be viewed as expanding the namespace
to let more commercial businesses get names, rather than necessarily "competing with"
.com.
.info is an interesting case, as it is chartered from the outset to be used
in the manner that .com has been *abused* -- as a free-for-all that can be used by
anybody and carries no implications of what sort of organization is using it (commercial,
nonprofit, governmental, etc.)
It's a namespace, not a horse race; Internet users
and developers win as a whole if more of them can get good, meaningful names for
their sites, whether or not speculators have something to get rich on.
In just
what way does .com have to "win" over .org, .gov, or .museum? The names have different
purposes, and since there are vastly more commercial entities than museums in the
world, it's clear which ending will have more sites, but that doesn't make .com the
winner or the "king".
Commercial stuff isn't *all* that's on the Internet, don't
forget.