ICANN Opening Up Domain Registration

[themike537]

Did anyone read in Forbes that mid next year ICANN will allow people to register whatever they want? The article I read said people can request any .tld they want, including .soup, .nuts, or .anything. Thus www.online.poker and other similar domains would be up for grabs. Thoughts?

[JeremyM]

I'm curious how Google will weigh those domain.

I do imagine there will be a ton of domains bought up the day it happens. Very interesting though!

[Goose]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-new-tlds.html

Businesses must apply to register the TLD first, then go through a review process to ensure that it isn't offensive and doesn't infringe on anyone's intellectual property. If approved, registering the TLD will cost anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000, ICANN says, and the business or organization must prove that they are either capable of managing the TLD or can reach a deal with a company that will

Anyone fancy getting together as a consortium to operate the .poker TLD

[Nat Arem]

I think .poker and the like won't have much value in Google. Obviously you can build a brand around something like http://online.poker or the like, but it will be similarly hard to do that as it would with your basic [something]poker.com or poker[something].com.

I've always thought the Eritrea extension (.er) had huge potential. http://pok.er could be a great brand. Not to mention that Jeremy could move his blog to http://ball.er if he could pick it up first.

[nookurt]

Not sure about the process you will have to go through to do this.

[Mark]

Seems like adding more TLD's would make everything more confusing.

Mark

[Kurt]

Not only will it become confusing, it will lead to a whole new URL-war situation where huge companies will for example fight over .poker which should end in a pretty ugly bidding war. And then there will be those picking up .pokr, .pker, .poke,... in order to take care of some of the mistyping that is going to happen.

[Nat Arem]

Not only will it become confusing, it will lead to a whole new URL-war situation where huge companies will for example fight over .poker which should end in a pretty ugly bidding war. And then there will be those picking up .pokr, .pker, .poke,... in order to take care of some of the mistyping that is going to happen.

I don't think the economics behind typo traffic will support huge TLD setup/management costs.

[Ruprikkt]

a trademark application was filed in April by a company call Top Level Domain Holdings.

Trademarks CANNOT be granted for tld extensions, but the company filed so they wouldnt have to deal with frivolous legal tactics from others.

but, it sure seems they intend to try for the .poker domain, whether on their own, or working with someone with deeper pockets.

BTW nobody will be able to get .pkr, .pokr, or .pker . . . they are too similar. It would create 'string confusion' according to ICANN and they would have to bid for it against those going after .poker.

Rupe