What's In a Name? For a Website It Could Soon Be Anything

What's in a name? For starters it could be .anything. This week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a big change for websites – soon domain names can be any combination of letters and numbers, including non-Latin character.

It wasn’t all that long ago that companies – large or small – had no website address. In fact, the first domain name registered was for now defunct computer maker Symbolics with symbolic.com back in March of 1985. The first true “household name” company was Xerox, which received Xerox.com in January of 1986.

Most of the original 100 companies to get domain names did so in these pre-World Wide Web days. But then all that changed in the mid-1990s, and there was a rush to grab key domain names. In one now infamous story journalist Josh Quittner bought McDonalds.com, before eventually selling to the famous fast food chain, and reportedly donating the proceeds to charity. Quittner wasn’t the only person to jump this bandwagon, and there was an era of “cybersquatting” where companies were forced to fight individuals to gain back what they believed were rightfully an extension of their trademarks. Many companies were able to wrestle control over their domains if the squatter couldn’t prove they could justify registering it.

This is why DennisMiller.com remains a website for a consulting firm, instead of for the famous comedian.

But what was a company to do if its name was similar to another’s? Wouldn’t ABC TV have a better claim to ABC.com over ABC Carpet for example? But let’s step back a bit.

Originally there was just six domain extensions including: .edu for educational institutions, which made sense since colleges and universities were among the first places to get online; .gov for government institutions; .mil for military; .net for generic top level network sites; .org for not-for-profit and other non-business entities; and finally .com for everything else. For the record someone should have seen this problem coming as many schools have the same initials – hence Carnegie Melon University is cmu.edu, whereas Central Michigan University is cmich.edu.

There was also .us, which has actually been around since 1985 as well, but became a valid second-level domain in April of 2002.  Additionally, there was a push to add other global Top Level Domains (gTLD) to the mix, bringing a total of 22 extensions including .aero for the air transport industry; .coop for cooperatives; .info for informational sites; .name for families and individuals and even .xxx for porn sites. These have certainly ensured that there is no shortage of domains available, but this week the ICANN has voted to allow for virtually unlimited extensions.

In some cases this could be .bank, as in BackofAmerica.bank, or .apple so that Steve Jobs could have a site SteveJobs.apple. The thought is that companies could take better control of their brands, where extensions could help take people directly to a product, thus ipad.apple would take users directly to the iPad’s unique page.

There are of course questions. Will this make it harder for search engines to accurately track all the product pages. Will small businesses need to be more creative as well in picking a domain name? For businesses with more common names this could help.

But will there be future issues? Depends on how deep the pockets might be too. Microsoft actually sued a Canadian high school student because his website was MikeRoweSoft.com. Microsoft claimed it was a case of trademark infringement because of its phonetic resemblance to its name. In the end the parties settled, and Mike Rowe was compensated.

Yet, it isn’t too difficult to see that there could be a new wave of cybersquatting, so all businesses should watch their brands closely. In the end however, this could solve many of those early problems.

In the future it could make it easy to find sites for common names as well, such as DennisMiller.consulting and DennisMiller.comedian. And maybe someday soon you’ll read these posts at all.business. I’ll talk to the bosses about that one.