The era of .com is coming to an end! How did that sound? Scary? Shocking?
Well, the latest news in the web industry that is catching everyone’s attention is that one will not be surprised to see .Ford, .Toyota in near future. Still confused? Major auto companies like Fiat, GM, Volkswgen, Ford, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai have applied for new domain name extensions. Instead of the traditional .com, .net, .org, the new domian name extentions could be the names of the company itself like .Fiat. Interesting isn’t it?
According to the report by Detroit Free Press, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the company that controls the domain extensions, accepted over 25 applications from major automakers. What is more thought provoking here is that these companies shelled out more than $4,625,000. That much for just a domain extension?
Currently, we have .com for commercial sites, .gov for government sites, .org for non-profit organizations, .edu for universities and few more which can be counted on finger tips. This classification helped the surfers to find what they wanted faster. With the arrival of these new domain extensions, would it create confusion? Perhaps, the companies think the other way round. According to them, use of company names as domain extension is a major marketing tool. This would also help the fans to connect to their favorite brands.
Now if the companies have decided to go for this change then we have certain questions for them. Most of the current domain owners allow the general public to buy the extensions to host related content. Will these automajors allow the use of their extensions by their fans for related blog posts and pages? Say, if I am a die hard fan of VW Beetle, will the company allow me to create a page called Beetle.VW or Beetle.Volkswagen? Most importantly, if we type Ford.com and run a search, will they reroute our request to Hello.Ford? Also, will the domain owners allow the dealers and other associates to set up their own pages using the companies domain extension? These questions will not take much time to answer as these domain extensions will soon come into existence.