I think the hope is the ICANN will take this type of thing in to consideration when selling the TLDs. Hopefully they sell the more generic (not company specific) TLDs to trade groups or independent agencies (think GoDaddy.com) that are going to resell those domains to industry professionals.
Only time will tell, but I doubt Progressive will be sold .insurance. I’m willing to bet you’ll be able to buy agencyname.insurance.
ICANN really blew this whole thing. Really. Can anyone state one good reason why anyone would pay $185,000 to apply for one of these silly gTLDs? The only difference I see between http://www.AIG.com and http://www.AIG.aig is that the latter means AIG has at minimum $185,000 fewer dollars with which to repay the taxpayers.
The only benefit seems to be perceived brand security from preventing the possibility of http://www.CompanyName.CompanyName directing browsers to an adversarial or undesirable web page (such as http://www.CompanyName.CompanyName redirecting the browser to http://www.CompanyNameSucks.com or to a site containing content the company does not want to be associated with). I really can’t see consumers caring or being bothered to keep track of all of these ridiculous new gTLDs.
Look up domain name prices. The market already shows the good ones like .com are much more desirable. For example a .biz address is more likely to be available and at a lower price than the same address with a .com domain.
Customers aren’t going to type “www.ProgressiveInsurance.Progressive” or “www.northwesternmutual.northwesternmutual”. They are going to type “www.northwesternmutual.com,” or more likely they are just going to type Northwestern Mutual into Google and click on the search result.
I am curious how this impacts the legal landscape of the internet. For example the United States’ has used a “.com” address to claim jurisdiction over and apply U.S. law to foreign websites having no servers or operations in the US whatsoever. The U.S. claims that, because Verisign manages the .com gTLD for ICANN and since Verisign has a domestic presence, EVERY WEBSITE with hosted on a .com gTLD is subject to United States law.
I think you are being a little too narrow minded. What .insurance is doing is quite literally making a more organized “marketplace” for products of the industry.
It will be much more secure, accurate and easy to use. Imagine it like walking down an grocery store isle with signs indicating exactly whats down the isle, .bread, .meat, .snacks etc. This will create seamless versatility & browsing for uses from retailers, wholesalers & consumers.
If progressive wanted to create .progressive, it would be utilized as (www)auto.progressive, home.progressive, business.progressive, liability.progressive etc.
Right now, anyone can create a .com, but I imagine the restrictions and qualifications are going to be much stricter with more individualized marketplace domains.
Good points from both of you really. Plus I’m not real sure the name has as much significance with Google and other search engines ranking, finding, and displaying websites based on relevancy. If you spend enough, XYZ.com, would rise to the top on search engines.
I think for some of the company name specific TLDs (.apple, .google, .gmail, etc.) you are correct.
However, for the more generic terms like .insurance, ICANN will be looking to sell it to an organization that will resell the TLDs to others, like what Frank said below.
Also, domain names are used by search engines for ranking sites. I would hope that over time industry specific TLDs like .insurance would gain more weight in search results when the search engine knows the user is looking for something insurance related.
These new TLDs also offer the opportunity for more, not less, supply. Theoretically, this should drive the price of owning a domain name, down, not up. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m hopefully that these new TLDs offer opportunities to own a useful domain name.
My main complaint with this entire process is how expensive it is to become the owner of a TLD. Obviously this application fee was designed to keep the common person from bidding on every word combination known to man. Is this fair? Probably not. Is it the best way to handle it? Under the circumstances, probably. The best solution would be to have ICANN (or some other organization) responsible for selling domain names from every TLDs. Let’s say ICANN got in to the business of selling domain names, not just licensing TLDs, this open the path to buying any domain name you want, not just hoping that you can buy bob.insurance from whomever was able to purchase .insurance from ICANN.
As a last note, I think as long as .insurance is sold to an organization that plans to resell domain names, our industry will be ok. I would rather buy chris.insurance than chrisinsurance.com.
The web was suppose to democratize commerce, the idea was that agents and companies big and small would have some opportunity to reach customers via the web. But this is just one step closer to a world where every insurance agency is replaced by 6 large companies, employing $3 dollar an hour workers in India.
I’m going to keep fighting my own personal local insurance SEO battle against my competition regardless. See you on page 1 for your keywords too. Check me out at http://www.txinsurancepro.com
Our submissions for nonprofit insurance and new agent attraction are highly driven by keywords and internet presence
I’m very interested to see how these .insurance domains play out!
Another way to cut out local insurance agents. Insurance should be an open domain. I should be able to buy my agency name.insurance.
Tammy,
I think the hope is the ICANN will take this type of thing in to consideration when selling the TLDs. Hopefully they sell the more generic (not company specific) TLDs to trade groups or independent agencies (think GoDaddy.com) that are going to resell those domains to industry professionals.
Only time will tell, but I doubt Progressive will be sold .insurance. I’m willing to bet you’ll be able to buy agencyname.insurance.
I don’t get this at all. Can someone please explain why in the world anyone would want to type http://www.CompanyName.Insurance instead of http://www.CarrierName.com?
ICANN really blew this whole thing. Really. Can anyone state one good reason why anyone would pay $185,000 to apply for one of these silly gTLDs? The only difference I see between http://www.AIG.com and http://www.AIG.aig is that the latter means AIG has at minimum $185,000 fewer dollars with which to repay the taxpayers.
The only benefit seems to be perceived brand security from preventing the possibility of http://www.CompanyName.CompanyName directing browsers to an adversarial or undesirable web page (such as http://www.CompanyName.CompanyName redirecting the browser to http://www.CompanyNameSucks.com or to a site containing content the company does not want to be associated with). I really can’t see consumers caring or being bothered to keep track of all of these ridiculous new gTLDs.
Look up domain name prices. The market already shows the good ones like .com are much more desirable. For example a .biz address is more likely to be available and at a lower price than the same address with a .com domain.
Customers aren’t going to type “www.ProgressiveInsurance.Progressive” or “www.northwesternmutual.northwesternmutual”. They are going to type “www.northwesternmutual.com,” or more likely they are just going to type Northwestern Mutual into Google and click on the search result.
I am curious how this impacts the legal landscape of the internet. For example the United States’ has used a “.com” address to claim jurisdiction over and apply U.S. law to foreign websites having no servers or operations in the US whatsoever. The U.S. claims that, because Verisign manages the .com gTLD for ICANN and since Verisign has a domestic presence, EVERY WEBSITE with hosted on a .com gTLD is subject to United States law.
I think you are being a little too narrow minded. What .insurance is doing is quite literally making a more organized “marketplace” for products of the industry.
It will be much more secure, accurate and easy to use. Imagine it like walking down an grocery store isle with signs indicating exactly whats down the isle, .bread, .meat, .snacks etc. This will create seamless versatility & browsing for uses from retailers, wholesalers & consumers.
If progressive wanted to create .progressive, it would be utilized as (www)auto.progressive, home.progressive, business.progressive, liability.progressive etc.
Right now, anyone can create a .com, but I imagine the restrictions and qualifications are going to be much stricter with more individualized marketplace domains.
Good points from both of you really. Plus I’m not real sure the name has as much significance with Google and other search engines ranking, finding, and displaying websites based on relevancy. If you spend enough, XYZ.com, would rise to the top on search engines.
ExciteBiker,
I think for some of the company name specific TLDs (.apple, .google, .gmail, etc.) you are correct.
However, for the more generic terms like .insurance, ICANN will be looking to sell it to an organization that will resell the TLDs to others, like what Frank said below.
Also, domain names are used by search engines for ranking sites. I would hope that over time industry specific TLDs like .insurance would gain more weight in search results when the search engine knows the user is looking for something insurance related.
These new TLDs also offer the opportunity for more, not less, supply. Theoretically, this should drive the price of owning a domain name, down, not up. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m hopefully that these new TLDs offer opportunities to own a useful domain name.
My main complaint with this entire process is how expensive it is to become the owner of a TLD. Obviously this application fee was designed to keep the common person from bidding on every word combination known to man. Is this fair? Probably not. Is it the best way to handle it? Under the circumstances, probably. The best solution would be to have ICANN (or some other organization) responsible for selling domain names from every TLDs. Let’s say ICANN got in to the business of selling domain names, not just licensing TLDs, this open the path to buying any domain name you want, not just hoping that you can buy bob.insurance from whomever was able to purchase .insurance from ICANN.
As a last note, I think as long as .insurance is sold to an organization that plans to resell domain names, our industry will be ok. I would rather buy chris.insurance than chrisinsurance.com.
The web was suppose to democratize commerce, the idea was that agents and companies big and small would have some opportunity to reach customers via the web. But this is just one step closer to a world where every insurance agency is replaced by 6 large companies, employing $3 dollar an hour workers in India.
I’m going to keep fighting my own personal local insurance SEO battle against my competition regardless. See you on page 1 for your keywords too. Check me out at http://www.txinsurancepro.com
Our submissions for nonprofit insurance and new agent attraction are highly driven by keywords and internet presence
I’m very interested to see how these .insurance domains play out!