Two pieces of information have crossed my desk over the last few days. The first one was a chart taken from the guys over at The Relationship Economy, which is below. There is a good write up of what this means over at the relationship-economy blog. (link here) My take on it is that the boom of the internet which has been powered by free services (Google, YouTube), has been even more amplified by its underpolicing and the ability for any user to take any domain name. I am in fact guity of this with about 10 domain names unused to my name. The relative cheap costs of setting up, hosting, and running a domain have spawned new entreprise from both legal and illegal entrepreneurs – genuine businesses and domain squatters. This has led to the boom in hostnames highlighted below and the ever growing difference between hostnames and Active names.
The second piece of information that has crossed my desk is in relation to the removal of latin only URLs. The basics are that all URLs use latin alphabet e.g a to z. The changes from ICANN will mean that any alphabet can be used to create domain names suffixes. (Surely in part due to the boom in China of internet usage over the past 2-3 years and the need for a better way of using the internet).
“The change, which will come into effect in November, relates to the portion of an internet address that follows the final or penultimate full stop. At present, users in countries such as Russia, Japan and China are free to type in the main body of an internet address in their own languages, but must then revert to Roman script to add suffixes such as “.ru”, “.co.jp” or “.cn”.
From November, suffixes written in a user’s native language will for the first time be translated into simple (ascii) characters that can be read by a computer.
“This change will have a great impact in opening up the internet to a wider audience,” Phil Kingsland of Nominet, the national registry for .uk domain names. “It will reduce existing complications and barriers to direct online access.””
ICANN believe this will broaden internet usage from 1.5bn to 5bn once the changes are implemented. However, for more frequent internet users its probably been awhile since you actually typed in a full domain name and worried about the suffix e.g. is it .co.uk or .com? Therefore, the changes aren’t probably particularly big.
Also, the changes only affect particular countries and as they don’t affect the whole domain URL, just the suffix, are they actually that big a deal. This is especially the case when users have to switch from one alphabet to the other just simply to fill in .xx or .yy.
It will be interesting to see how this develops, but I can’t see it causing massive issues and certainly I don’t think it is going to be a driver for an additional 3.5bn internet users. The only thing that will do this is cheaper computers and better developing world access to faster broadband, something that even ICANN can do nothing about. Finally, it certainly won’t reduce the number of squatters which I believe ICANN have more of a role in than anything else.
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