Coming soon: .beer, .love and even .unicorn
Share Now on:
Coming soon: .beer, .love and even .unicorn
Coming soon to your Internet browsing experience: .beer, .love and .app.
Companies have submitted applications for more than 1,400 new top-level domain names. Those are the suffixes that come at the end of a web address, where we have .com and .org now.
Paul Sloan is executive editor at CNET. He says, “If you’re used to going to a site and they suddenly start using .web or .home or .something else. You might say, huh, what’s this? But then you’ll get used to it and it will be the same experience.”
He says once the confusion created by all the new address messiness wears off, it’ll be pretty manageable. That is, unless you’ve got a brand you are trying to protect.
Paul Sloan: It’s a downside if you have a small business and someone suddenly uses your name connected to .pet and .play and .spot. Gosh there are so many, aren’t there? It just gets a little crazy.
Hill: So it could cost a lot actually, if I come up with a great name for a company or a small business, it could actually cost a lot to protect that everywhere?
Sloan: Correct. I mean, that’s already the case, right? A lot of companies, it’s in their best interest to get the .net, the .co, the .org, the .younameit. I wonder if .younameit is in there, I didn’t see it on the list. So, it could add up and just become sort of a hassle.
It’ll also change things for folks who do their own web projects. Shane Greenstein is a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
Shane Greenstein: The at-home website maker today will go to a registry to find available website names and you would look under .biz or .org or .com. There’s just nothing available anymore. And so Adriene.com is probably not available anymore, you probably have to go to Adriene.net.
Hill: Now if I wanted Adriene.love or Adriene.wow, how would it work? How would I do that?
Greenstein: First of all you have to go to the registry that controls .wow or .love. They find out if it’s available. Then you pay a price for that. And then the registry will take the additional technical steps of making sure that name is available for all the relevant databases across the Internet so when someone else types that in, they can find your website.
Not that I can rush out and buy Adriene.wow today, even if I really, really want to. There’s still a months-long process before any of these new-domains go live.
**
Know way more about music than all of your friends? Looking for a way to impress them? Enter TastemakerX, a site that lets you buy and sell fake stock in bands and musicians.
Say you’re super into Carly Rae Jepsen. You can buy her stock, for just over two and a half points, and tweet or Facebook your friends to let them know. Then, when you get sick of “Call Me Maybe” on repeat in your head, or your friends make fun of you, you can sell her stock, and buy another stock in another band.
The better you do at buying low and selling high, the more of “tastemaker” you are. Which means Carly Rae may not be your best strategy.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
