IMHO new TLD's do not solve these problems:1) There will be no more 'usable'
and available domains.
Probably all companies who have a .com domain
will try to register
.web, .shop, .whatever as well. Heck, I would
do it for all
mydomains. It will only make the DNS larger and my
expenses
higher.
2) It does not resolve legal/trademark issues.
Cisco Systems has equal stake at claiming cisco.shop as
Cisco Trading
(yes, a company in The Netherlands which had
that name before Cisco
Systems came to The Netherlands).
What are your criteria then to
give company A the TLD and
not company B. IMHO size of the company
and the number of
countries the company is represented in is not
a criteria I
would use.
To prevent problem 1 from occuring you
might consider using the
following criteria (which I think should not be used,
see my
comments):
- a strict policy by stating that a company may only
claim one of the TLDs .net, .org, .com, .shop, .web, etc.
Practically this
is almost unverifiable. Corporations might
use various subsidiaries to
claim more than one TLD.
As for problem 2. You might ask yourselves:
-
Does a company name have higher precedence than a brand
name? For example
SUN microsystems vs. SUN dishwasher powder
(I think it is a part of Proctor
& Gamble).
- Trademarks are registered per country. Corporations might use
a name in one country and hold the trademark but in the other
country they
may not use it. The problem with TLDs is that they
are used for a worldwide
community, but companies are registered
per country, so you have a lot
of companies sharing the same name.
A registration issue.
Will the registration
be FIFO? The first
registrant will get the domain? This automatically means that
everyone
will try to register the domain at DNS-DAY, the day
we start registering the new
domains. My guess is all registrars
will be unavailable for a time...
If you
look at physical network locations some people farther
away from the registrars
will probably have less chance of
registering a domain than people directly connected
to these
registrars. Since probably no system of criteria will be good
enough
to give a domain to a certain corporation my vote would
be for a lottery. Assuming
the problem described about
subsidiaries is solved, the name or brand names have
something
to do with the domain, it would be the fairest for all involved.
It
would look like this:
- Every one has a certain time to claim a domain (a week,
a month?).
- If no one else claims the domain within that time the company
gets the domain.
- If there are more companies who want the domain the ones
who register their company name (i.e. sun.com) take precedence
over brand
names. A company may have more brand names but it
has only one company
name. See my note on subsidiaries about
problems with this criterium. Some
people noted that this
did not work for their ccTLD's, but it would work
if it was
implemented in all TLD's.
- A lottery will decide who gets
the domain. Bad luck for all the
rest.
One drawback of this system is
the time one has to wait before
obtaining the domain. Another is the issue of
competing companies
starting subsidiaries to try to block/steal their opponents
name.