Category Archives: Events

The dust is starting to settle from the latest land-grab on the Internet. While it’s not over yet – there will probably be a year or more of behind the scenes wrangling – the claims on the various turfs have been filed. And the results show just how ambitious some of the movers and shakers have become; in particular, the merchandising giant, Amazon.com. The cyberturf in question are the latest extensions to the top-level domains. The Domain Name System, (DNS), regulated by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers), gives names to websites that enables users to locate them. They are organized into broad categories of some 300 total top-level domains, consisting of 22 generic classes (like org, restricted to non-profit organizations) and 280 country codes (us for US, uk for Great Britain, ca for China and so on). By far the most popular is com, for commercial enterprises, in which there are millions of websites. This has led to intense competition for names, domain squatting and parking, and other practices. So, over the last decade, ICANN has been slowly moving to open up the system. In its latest effort, some 2,000 top-level domains revealed here (note: long list, loads slowly) have been applied for at a cool $185,000 per name (plus in case of disputes, up to $122,000 or more). So obviously only wealthy speculators and major Internet entities have applied. And presumably, with such money and … Continue reading →