I couldn’t let today go by without referencing the web address shake up that starts today. This follows six years of development overseen by ICANN, the international Quango. Companies can now bid to create suffixes that reflect their company, brand or activity at the end of their web address.
This is obviously a big opportunity for brands to generate even greater awareness for themselves as they can now apply for the rights to use their brand name, e.g. Pepsi could try to buy the address, ‘.pepsi’.
Simple! Well, there are a few steps to walk through first.
1/ Register the web address suffix for a fee of £119,000
2/ Deadline: April 12, 2012
3/ Wait eight months for the evaluation process to be completed.
This is the biggest shake up since the introduction of the .xxx suffix to give adult websites a separate place on the Internet. We won’t be seeing the results until next year, but challenges have already been made to the approach with companies including Coca-Cola and Johnson&Johnson flagging that this change will increase costs and the potential for internet fraud.
Let’s see how creative or safe brands are with this new opportunity. It seems the web just got that little bit bigger!
