Should I buy a generic domain name?
24/06/2011
Generic domains will be available from next year. This means you can acquire almost any domain name you want with anything after the last dot. So the widget company could acquire and use the .widget domain allowing website addresses of www.widget.
Will the new generic domain names be worth it?
For most business, no, but for large corporations then yes.
There is a cost to this process of over £100,000, and you need to show you have a legitimate claim to this name. So buying .google or .bbc will not be possible.
Applications for these domain names will start on 12th January 2012.
Should I use a generic domain name?
It will be possible later to purchase sub domains from many of the new domains. It will be interesting to see how this works. However there well be legal issues with any domain being owned by ‘anyone’ and practical marketing issues of the value of these new domain names in search engines.
Legally, in the UK, Nominet is an independent organisation able to deal with domain name disputes, but these safe guards are unlikely to exist with the new top level domains.
At the moment some top level domain names are more valuable than others. For example .com and .co.uk carry far more weight than .eu or .me. It is likely that in future the search engines will rank these new domain names according to their perceived quality.
There are some areas where using a new generic domain name will be more useful, and this applies to non Latin languages, as the new domain names will allow full flexibility with characters used.
