Net businesses dominate bids for suffixes

14 Jun 2012, 8:18 am   -   Source: AAP
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Leading internet businesses have bidded for specific suffixes for their web addresses.

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Amazon.com wants ".joy," Google wants ".love" and L'Oreal wants ".beauty."

Big brands are behind hundreds of proposals for new internet addresses, including scores for generic terms such as "cruise," ".kids" and ".tyres."

If approved, Amazon could use ".author" in an attempt to dominate online bookselling, while Google could use ".love" to collect registration fees from its rivals.

Amazon and Google also are vying for ".app" and ".music," while the wine company Gallo Vineyards Inc. wants ".barefoot."

It's all part of the largest expansion of the internet address system since its creation in the 1980s, a process likely to cause headaches for some companies while creating vast opportunities for others.

The organisation in charge of internet addresses, the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced the proposals for internet suffixes Wednesday. A suffix is the ".com" part in a domain name.

The bids now go through a review that could take months or years. Up to 1000 suffixes could be added each year.

There were 1930 proposals for 1409 different suffixes. The bulk of proposals that met the May 30 deadline came from North America and Europe. About 100 were for suffixes in non-English characters, including Chinese, Arabic and Thai.

From a technical standpoint, the names let internet-connected computers know where to send email and locate websites. But they've come to mean much more. For Amazon.com Inc., for instance, the domain name is the heart of the company, not just an address.

A new suffix could be used to identify sites that have a certain level of security protection. It could be used to create online neighbourhoods of businesses affiliated with a geographic area or an industry. French cosmetics giant L'Oreal, for instance, proposed ".beauty" as a home for beauty products and general information on personal beauty.

But there's a question of how useful the new names will be. Alternatives to ".com" introduced over the past decade have had mixed success. These days, internet users often find websites not by typing in the address but by using a search engine. And with mobile devices getting more popular, people are using apps to bypass web browsers entirely.

Many businesses worry that they'll have to police the internet for addresses that misuse their brands, in many cases paying to register names simply to keep them away from others.

"One thing that's going to occur is a lot of money is going to get sucked out of the ecosystem," said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For internet Responsibility and a strong critic of ICANN.

"The cost is billions and billions of dollars with no value returned to people and an enormous capacity for confusion."

One worry is that an expansion will mean more addresses available to scam artists who use similar-sounding names such as "Amazom" rather than "Amazon" to trick people into giving passwords and credit card information.

The public now has 60 days to comment on the proposals. There's also a seven-month window for filing objections, including claims of trademark violation.

Of the 1930 proposals, 1179 were unique and 751 were for 230 different suffixes. ICANN will hold an auction if competing bidders cannot reach a compromise. Most of the duplicate bids were for generic names, though the Guardian newspaper and The Guardian Life Insurance Co both sought ".guardian."

Bidders had to pay $US185,000 ($A186,464) per proposal. If approved, each suffix would cost at least $US25,000 a year to maintain, with a 10-year commitment required. By comparison, a personal address with a common suffix such as ".com" usually costs less than $US10 a year.

Some of the proposals are for suffixes to be reserved for in-house use. Yahoo Inc and Microsoft Corp, for instance, plan to restrict ".yahoo and ".microsoft" to their sites or affiliates, while keeping their current names under ".com." If Google Inc wins its bid for ".search," the search leader won't let rivals use it.

But there are hundreds of proposals for generic names that the public would be able to buy names under - for $10 or thousands depending on the suffix. Some are coming from entrepreneurs or businesses that specialise in domain names.

SBS, the publisher of this website, has applied for the .sbs suffix.

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