Speculation would be reduced but so would the perceived
value too. There was a previous poster in this forum who complained about the fact
that he paid close to $10,000 for a .COM name that he was using as a foundation for
a site that he expects to be profitable. He was complaining about the fact that he
most likely won't get the .BIZ or .INFO equivalents and the effects of dilution this
will have on his client base, especially if he ends up with a similar business occupying
any of those spaces.
Given the fact that domain name extensions are being released
in what seems to be a complete haphazard function, this will take us back to my previous
arguements against creating overlapping extensions and I don't want to get into that
again. We all agree that BIZ made more sense than COM but two wrongs don't make a
right, BIZ should never have happened. We have to agree on one of the following
two definitions and then all following discussion will fall into place:
1. We are
for domain extensions having a scarcity factor.
OR
2. We are for unrestricted
domain extensions.
This is the one thing that we all have to reach a consensus
on. If you chose #2 then you have just indicated that domain extensions should disappear
altogether. This plays out extremely well for the Yahoos and the Excites of this
world. It is also the foundation of the "Trademark" lobby. What they say is that
the prefix is what counts but the suffix doesn't. So in essence Apple.biz and Apple.fruit
and Apple.sex and Apple.God should all belong to Apple Computers.
Personally I
think we need extensions and lots of them as long as they DON'T overlap.
Cat.com
is a company
Cat.info is an animal
Cat.name is a person
etc. etc.
What
we have today is a great number of extensions that qualify as one and the same, COM,
BIZ, INFO, NET, WEB, ORG, US, USA, WS could be argued to mean a business entity or
product line that are confusingly similar.
Another huge mistake that ICANN did
was to even consider the TM lobby for INFO. To me Apple.info means nothing more than
visitting Apple.com and reading their "About Apple" page. If I was Afilias, I would
lobby Apple Computers to sponsor a site on the fruit this way they own the name but
foster the extension.