The Impact of New Domain Suffixes on the Internet

1. The Past and Present of ICANN

ICANN, The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was founded in 1998 and is responsible for allocating Internet resources such as domain names and IP addresses. ICANN’s predecessor was IANA (Internet Assigned number Authority), which for a long time was funded directly by the U.S. Department of Defense. To avoid a situation in which a single country controlled the Internet, the non-profit organization ICANN was established in 1998. Although it has shaken off its dependence on the U.S. Department of Defense, ICANN today still has indirect subordinate relationships with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Federal Communications Commission.

The creation of ICANN was to a large extent orchestrated behind the scenes by a company called SAIC. SAIC is a company that signs contracts with the U.S. military. SAIC discovered that a small company called NSI was earning a rich income from the monopoly right to operate domain name registration, so it forcibly bought NSI. A few months later, the U.S. government decided that NSI could charge domain owners an annual service fee of 50 dollars. To protect this hefty revenue, SAIC instigated the founding of ICANN, on the pretext of maintaining Internet stability and preventing trademark monopolies.

2. Classification of Domain Names

Click to view all domain suffixes

According to IANA’s domain classification, domain names fall into the following categories.

Sponsored organization domains: 15 in total. These are generally proprietary domains for government, military, and educational institutions, such as .gov, .mil, .edu and the like.
Infrastructure organization domain: just one, .arpa. We really had no idea what kind of domain this was, so we looked up a brief introduction online: a name left over from ARPANET (the computer network established by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), used for the Internet’s internal functions. Perhaps this is a domain the United States uses internally.
Country and geographic domains: 307 in total. Every region in the world has a domain representing it, such as China’s .cn domain and the United States’ .us domain. In other words, in the world of domain names, the world is divided into 307 regions. This is not necessarily a division by country; a region can have its own domain too. For example, China’s Hong Kong has the .hk domain and China’s Taiwan has the .tw domain. Country domains generally consist of two letters.
Category domains: 1119 in total. These include generic top-level domains such as .com and .net, and also the various new top-level domains that only began in 2011. Because IANA merged new top-level domains together with generic domains, in order to count the number of new top-level domains separately we consulted the third-party new top-level domain statistics site Ntldstats. As of July 2016, there were 1108 new top-level domains worldwide.
Test domains: 11 in total. IANA’s label for this category is simply “TEST”.

The expanded domains belong to the category domains, which currently consist of three or more characters. The new domain suffixes can be roughly divided into four types:

Generic top-level domains, such as .xyz, .ooo, .site and the like.
Regional, country, and city domains, such as .london, .durban, .taipei and the like.
Industry top-level domains, such as .bike, .pizza, .media, .lawyer, .host, .football, .school, .golf and the like.
Company-personalized top-level domains, such as .alibaba, .google and the like.

3. What Impact Will There Be

The expansion of new domain suffixes has undoubtedly brought new vitality to the Internet. Registrations of .com domains have passed a hundred million, making it hard for new Internet entrants to register a suitable domain name — yet it is precisely the continuous influx of these new entrants that drives the prosperity of the Internet. The Internet will always be a world for the young. Expanding new domain suffixes can make the Internet world more vibrant, with all kinds of websites surging forth and more and more individuals capable of building their own sites.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last two “/8” address blocks of its IPv4 address space in February 2011. This marked the end of the “free pool” of IPv4 address space available to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). We have entered the IPv6 era; IPv6’s enormous IP capacity provides effective address resources for the Internet and the Internet of Things. But how should these IoT devices be managed and accessed? From the earlier blog post, Domain Name Registration and Value Analysis
you can see that domain names correspond to IP addresses. The new domain suffixes connect to IPV6, preparing for the arrival of a new Internet era.

The purpose of a domain name is to make access convenient, so that people do not have to memorize dotted-decimal IP addresses. For merchants with deep pockets, spending over a hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain a domain suffix that carries only their brand is entirely worthwhile. Take .citic of CITIC Group: its subsidiaries can use XXX.citic, which carries very high credibility. At the same time, because the DNS servers are autonomous, it can avoid pollution from other DNS servers and improve accessibility; group customers can also have their own .citic domain names, which increases customer stickiness.

For companies lacking resources or just starting out, the new domain suffixes lower the barrier to entry on the Internet. With the large batch of new suffixes, it is still easy to pick a suitable domain name through various creative ideas and careful selection. But once the company grows large, the problems become obvious. For example, the creative domain del.icio.us could also be turned into de.licio.us; the traffic of about.me gets stolen by aboutme.com, and so on. After all, .com is the overlord. NCC: over 50% of consumers do not trust websites that use new domain suffixes.

4. Final Advice on Investing in and Registering New Domain Suffixes

A domain name highlights the brand — I analyzed this in the previous blog post on domain names as well. Apart from premium new-suffix domains, or premium creative domains such as single letters and single digits — those that are truly extreme in meaning or length and can be registered — nothing else is worth considering. There is of course another kind, such as splitting Chinese and English two-part or three-part names into single-part or two-part forms plus a suffix, but the most important thing is still to protect the two-part and three-part .com domains. For example, for foxmail.com, registering fox.mail is very meaningful.

With so many new domain suffixes, how do you protect your domain name? Register a trademark! As China’s reforms advance, intellectual property is becoming more and more important; in the coming decades China will become a society that deeply respects knowledge — this year, 2016. Domain name + trademark + trade name: protect the brand both online and offline. Even if a new domain suffix is registered by someone else, once it affects the brand image, you can sue over it.