Over the course of the next year, ICANN, the board responsible for determining how the internet grows, is going to be introducing a broad variety of new domain name extensions, giving access to new top level domains beyond the common .com, .net, .org, etc. While previous expansions have occured, the new changes are guaranteed to offer an exceedingly large number of domains that previously were not on the market. While at first this seems like a gift to domain name squatters, looking to make money off big companies that want to protect their brand name. This isn’t guaranteed however, and with the sheer number of domains becoming available, it seems almost impossible that there will be any future in domain name squatting.

Domain squatting has become a serious problem, it reared its head recently when President Bush’s library had to re-purchase its domain after failing to renew it. The legal issues at hand are complicated, because while part of the issue is certainly related to intellectual property and trademark protection, thats only half the problem. Companies are not diligent about renewing their domains, and if one expires, it really is their own fault. Either way, the fear, as it relates to these new domains, is that companies will now have to secure dozens, even hundreds of domains in order to protect themselves from sites that use their name and a different extension. This is based on the current model for web traffic, one which is already almost gone. The fact is, while people still type in some domains, search engines are a dominant force in traffic. Because Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have a vested interest in taking you to legitimate sites, they will be sure to deliver the correct results, rather than squatted sites.

Of course, some large companies will take the initiative to prevent this, but if you are a smaller site, you will have to think of your domain as less important than your name. Indeed, the ability to create new domains actually allows for more companies to choose a site name that is close to their company name. This expansion might actually be good for intellectual property because sites won’t have to invest a great deal of effort in finding a domain they like, they’ll be able to use one of the many new extensions made available to them by the ICANN decision.

This really is the only acceptable path forward for the internet, as the number of available domains has shrunk and the internet has simply grown too large for straight domain browsing to be the dominant source of traffic. In the long run, with the number of sites growing at the rate it has, there will be no reason to worry about a site on a parallel domain, as their traffic will come in from their keywords, not yours, and will therefore be based on that sites individual search engine performance. This decision is good news for everyone and should help provide room for growth and innovation going forward.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to my RSS feed.
There are more resources available at our On-line Webmaster Resource Center.