One of many instances of companies registering their names, trademarks, and slogans. There's also .AFAMILYCOMPANY, for instance, proposed by Johnson & Johnson.
I seriously hope that ICANN blanket-rejects all proposals which include trademarks, on the grounds that they would be of no use to anyone other than the trademark holder.
based on other articles on this topic, it seems that allowing for trademark names is half the point (e.g. Canon.com switching to .Canon). These companies aren't applying for the string so that others may use it, they're applying so that their company brand is all over their domain.
Right. And that's something I disagree with -- it's my position that TLDs should only be created where they will be some sort of utility to a significant segment of Internet users.
Besides, working with my example of .AFAMILYCOMPANY, I'm not sure that J&J even has any good uses in mind for it. They do have afamilycompany.com registered, but it doesn't appear to have any DNS records set up.
I seriously hope that ICANN blanket-rejects all of this. Polluting the top-level namespace is a fool's game. This is one of the shittiest ideas ever to happen to the Internet.
I dunno. There's a few ideas in there which might work well if managed properly, like .APP and .WEB. They're well-hidden in the sea of crap, though, and the world can certainly go on without them.
I count 1930 applications, which is $357M in revenue, given the stated application fee of $185,000. This is three times the projected revenue of $92M [1]. It'll be interesting to see how ICANN ends up spending this money.
Quoting linked paper's abstract (please include a summary next time):
> This paper uncovers a new phenomenon in web search that
we call domain bias — a user’s propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain. We provide evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. We begin by studying the difference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, we run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a user’s opinion of which page is more relevant. We find that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time.
I skimmed the paper, and it looks interesting but not really relevant to this story. They find that swapping the domains webmd.com and genetichealth.com causes people to prefer the result labeled "webmd.com" (with genetichealth.com's content). All this seems to suggest is that WebMD has a reputation for relevant health content, i.e. it's the reputation attached to the domain that matters, not the domain itself. (If it IS the domain itself, that's not established here.) So if WebMD moved to "webmd.health" or just "webmd.", once people got used to the change, it doesn't seem that this would affect the results.
The exe's bio says, "Prior to joining TLDH, Peter Dengate Thrush was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN, and in that role led the process that resulted in the historic decision to launch the new gTLD program in June 2011."
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 77.6 ms ] threadI seriously hope that ICANN blanket-rejects all proposals which include trademarks, on the grounds that they would be of no use to anyone other than the trademark holder.
Besides, working with my example of .AFAMILYCOMPANY, I'm not sure that J&J even has any good uses in mind for it. They do have afamilycompany.com registered, but it doesn't appear to have any DNS records set up.
Why? Another entry in the root zone costs almost nothing.
[1] http://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/explanatory-mem...
I wonder how (and if) they are going to select a 'winner'
> This paper uncovers a new phenomenon in web search that we call domain bias — a user’s propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain. We provide evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. We begin by studying the difference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, we run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a user’s opinion of which page is more relevant. We find that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time.
I skimmed the paper, and it looks interesting but not really relevant to this story. They find that swapping the domains webmd.com and genetichealth.com causes people to prefer the result labeled "webmd.com" (with genetichealth.com's content). All this seems to suggest is that WebMD has a reputation for relevant health content, i.e. it's the reputation attached to the domain that matters, not the domain itself. (If it IS the domain itself, that's not established here.) So if WebMD moved to "webmd.health" or just "webmd.", once people got used to the change, it doesn't seem that this would affect the results.
Then go to their website, and click management. http://www.tldh.org/management/
The exe's bio says, "Prior to joining TLDH, Peter Dengate Thrush was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN, and in that role led the process that resulted in the historic decision to launch the new gTLD program in June 2011."
Seems like a conflict of interest.