Soon it may be possible for anyone to get their own Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) on the Internet. Icann, the organization behind pretty much all domain names, are currently investigating if it should be possible to register for example .google or perhaps .microsoft.
The fee for your own gTLD would be about 185 000 USD in starting fee and about 25 000 USD in a yearly fee. The good thing with your own TLD is that you can “register” as many domain names as you like without having to pay any additional fees. In theory you could also start charging for domain name registrations if you register a cool TLD other may want to use in their domain name.
Last time we saw new TLDs on the Internet was when TLDs like .name, .info, .pro and .areo was introduced in the early 2000’s. From the new TLDs only .info became kind of successful in the number of registrations (mostly by giving away domain names or only charing $0.99 for them). This lead to spammers and other shady people registering and using the .info TLD for shady activities, giving the .info TLD a bad reputation.
In the latest count of number of pages by TLD from Xavier Media Whois .com is still the dominating TLD, and the original gTLDs from the early days of Internet are all in the top. So the question is if it’s worth registering a new TLD if you plan to resell domain names?
For big trademark owners like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft it could be a nice thing to get, but for everyone else it might just become a headache. What do you think?
