[Infowarrior] - New TLDs to add to confusion...

[Richard Forno]

www.thosenewdomainnames.areforsuckers

Soon you'll be able to buy any top-level domain you  
want: .yourname, .america, .whatever. Don't do it.By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Tuesday, July 7, 2009, at 6:25 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2222408/

In 1996, Microsoft bought the domain Slate.com from a guy named John  
Slate. Back in the early days of the Web, it paid to have a snazzy dot- 
com name to call your own. In conversation, the proper noun slate can  
refer to, among other things, a restaurant in Maine; a furniture- 
design studio in Illinois; a turkey breed; a private-party venue in  
New York; the student newspaper of Pennsylvania's Shippensburg  
University; or a Web magazine founded by Microsoft. Humans can usually  
figure out which of these Slates you're referring to based on the  
context, but computers weren't that smart—whichever one of those  
institutions pounced on Slate.com would get a boost in traffic from  
browsers looking for all those other slates. As a consequence of this  
same-name problem, scores of domain-name lawsuits have flared up over  
the years, as have attempts to game the system. "Cybersquatters" could  
once make good money by buying up domains that were similar to those  
of organizations with deep pockets and then selling them back to the  
organizations at huge premiums. (That wasn't the case with John Slate;  
Microsoft's lawyers propositioned him without revealing that they  
worked for the software giant.)

Now ICANN, the international body in charge of domain names, says it  
has a way to rid the Web of cybersquatting. Late last month, the group  
voted to create Web addresses that end in a much wider variety of  
letters than .com, .org, .net, and the dozens of country-specific  
suffixes that are currently available. When the proposal goes into  
effect later this year, businesses, municipalities, and other large  
organizations will be able to purchase domains of their own creation.  
The city of New York could buy its own suffix—to get to a city site,  
you'd type Police.nyc or Fire.nyc, and you'd e-mail Michael Bloomberg  
at Mayor at cityhall.nyc. Companies might do something similar: Twitter  
could register .twitter and give each of its users a quicker way to  
get to their pages—Fmanjoo.twitter instead of Twitter.com/fmanjoo. And  
even though ICANN plans to prohibit some top-level domains on moral  
grounds, the adult industry is expected to scoop up lots of names,  
from .xxx to .escort to .2girls1cup.

ICANN argues that adding new descriptive domains will reduce the  
chance for confusion. Slate design studio in Illinois, for instance,  
could buy Slate.illinois or Slate.furniture, creating an online  
identity separate from that of this magazine. And while cybersquatting  
is already prohibited by trademark law in many countries, including  
the United States, ICANN promises to implement a strict international  
review process to prevent miscreants from registering names that they  
shouldn't own. Only Facebook will be allowed to manage the .facebook  
domain, for example, and if someone tries to buy Slate.webmagazine,  
Slate's lawyers will be able to shut it down in a jiffy.

But ICANN's plan comes about five years too late—cybersquatting isn't  
a problem anymore. Indeed, ICANN's plan to sell all these new top- 
level domains at very high prices—tens of thousands of dollars or more— 
seems like a scam, because domain names themselves just don't matter  
that much nowadays. Web browsers have gotten a lot smarter since the  
1990s, and they're now pretty good at determining what we want when we  
type in names that have many possible meanings. If you're a fan of the  
Slate private-party venue in New York and visit its site often, you've  
just got to type S-L-A into your browser's address bar and the site  
will pop up in a drop-down list. That Slate would be foolish to pay  
very much to buy Slate.party.

What's more, lots of people now abandon the address bar entirely and  
rely, instead, on search engines to get around the Web. How do folks  
get to Match.com? According to Web traffic analysts, people type  
Match.com into Google and then click the top result. Are these people  
stupid? No, they're smart: It takes a lot of work to remember every  
company's exact domain name (is General Motors at GM.com or  
GeneralMotors.com or General-Motors.com?) and it's much faster to let  
Google keep track. Chrome, Google's Web browser, combines the address  
bar and search bar into a single field, which lets you use search  
terms as Web addresses. You don't have to remember Josh Marshall's  
long URL—Talkingpointsmemo.com—to get to his blog. Just type in josh  
marshall, and Chrome displays Google's top results.

To be sure, cybersquatters are still plying their trade, and according  
to trademark experts commissioned by ICANN (PDF), domain-name disputes  
have lately been on the rise. At the same time, though, you see Web  
sites getting much more adventurous in the domain names they pick—look  
at the Lolcats site Icanhascheezburger.com or the social-bookmarking  
site Del.icio.us (which later changed its name to Delicious.com).  
These names suggest a nonchalance about URLs. It no longer matters  
whether a domain name is really long or has an unconventional  
spelling; people will be able to find it, anyway.

And for cybersquatters, there are now other places to play. Social- 
networking sites are now the Web's biggest properties, so getting your  
identity on Facebook or Twitter has become much more important than  
getting a good domain. Recently Facebook offered its users vanity URLs— 
e.g., www.facebook.com/farhad.manjoo—on a first-come, first-served  
basis; the addresses were snapped up at a rate of more than 500 per  
second. Twitter, meanwhile, has become a haven for imposters. The site  
has had to close down accounts impersonating Exxon Mobil, Kanye West,  
and my colleague Emily Bazelon, among many others. Twitter has vowed  
to become more vigilant in its fight against poseurs, and surely it  
will implement a plan to do so. Because Twitter has total control over  
its names, it can deal with squatters much more quickly than is  
possible on the domain-name system, which is administered by thousands  
of registrars across the world.

But squatters wouldn't get very far even if Twitter never got its act  
together. Last year, someone got on Twitter and began tweeting as  
Shaquille O'Neal. When the real Shaq got wind of the faker, he didn't  
offer to pay for his identity; rather, he set up another name— 
The_Real_Shaq—and set the record straight. Now, it no longer matters  
that Shaq doesn't own his Twitter name; when you Google Shaq Twitter,  
The_Real_Shaq comes up first (he's got more than 1.5 million  
followers). We all should follow Shaq's example—don't ever pay for a  
screen name or a domain name again.

Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True  
Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at farhad.manjoo at slate.com 
  and follow him on Twitter.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2222408/