Biggest change to domain names for decades, says Internet body

The Internet’s global co-ordinator has put forward a radical proposal which will allow companies to replace the ‘.com’ suffix at the end of a website address with their own name. The move has been hailed as the biggest change to domain names since the creation of ‘.com’ 26 years ago. 

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, voted overwhelmingly in favour of the proposal at a meeting in Singapore despite some concerns that the new suffixes could cause confusion.

Sebastien Bachollet, a member of the ICANN board, agreed the change may cause some difficulties at first, but said this would not be long-term.

“I trust we have the tools to ensure the phase of stress will be brief,” he said.

If the new proposal goes ahead, it will not be cheap to implement.

It will cost a company over 129,000 euros to apply for the domain name and there are a number of criteria that need to be met before ICANN will give the go-ahead for the change to take place.

The organisation says high fee is needed to recoup the costs associated with the generic top level domains (gTLD) programme. It is also aimed at weeding out applicants seeking to resell names for a profit after buying them cheaply.

According to the draft new gTLD applicant guidebook only “established corporations, organisations or institutions in good standing may apply for a new gTLD.” The organisation will not consider applications from private individuals or sole proprietorships.