Following the ICANN announcement that allow the implementation of new domain names online, it’s interesting to see the implications it will have on a country such Pakistan, that has a fast growing online presence.
People are generally very web savvy – more so than other countries. There might not be a global demand for hundreds of millions of people to visit websites that contain localized content, because let’s face it: in the country, you don’t have enough users; and because such a small number of websites are search engine optimized, people outside the country can’t search and find the websites that hold the content. Every third person you come across either owns a website, manages it, works in a company that depends on traffic and leads generated from it, or is thinking about getting one made.
That’s probably a very big reason for RSS and this entire rigmarole of pushing and pulling content makes so much sense to people in this part of the world. The smallest website pulls feeds and pushes content. Syndication isn’t yielding high rewards yet, but all that is just an evolution and learning curve away.
But the announcement made by ICANN is interesting in a number of ways. The fact that you don’t need to rely on a dotCom domain, or even worry about finding your desired domain in the 21 top level domains, is exciting. It’s also opening up the floodgates for people who want to squat your domain, but even that is all about ‘thought of – bought off’ game.
“One of the most exciting prospect before us is that the expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Chairman. “This is going to be very important for the future of the Internet in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia.” The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.
But imagine the possibilities of marketing your complete communities or complete brands with just your domain. Take Karachi as an example. You could have an endless family of domains catering to every possible vertical in the city. ‘cars.karachi’, ‘sites.karachi’, ‘parks.karachi’, ‘homes.karachi’ – In isolation, sure, the concept doesn’t sound very exciting, but think large virtual community centers. Think ‘Portals’! Complete virtual real estate promoted to the browser IDN even before the content loads up.
While there are so many downsides to the announcement in things such as CyberSquatting and immense confusion because of the sheer fact that the internet and ‘dotCom” have become somewhat synonymous for at least three generations, another fear is how will the larger brands and trademarks protect their identities? You can have an infinite number of combinations for ‘anything.google’ or ‘everything.apple’ – Will there be brand protection policies in place? What kinds of rules and laws will be there to safeguard brands and benefit the individual user? This will be an interesting story to unravel however you can be sure that it is going to jumpstart the web fever, all over again…
The number of people wanting to use the internet to initiate and activate their businesses, is endless. ICANN is just trying to encourage the growth by allowing it the freedom to truly grow.. We’re just hoping things don’t spiral out of control.
