The pillar of the basic Web address — the trusty domain — is about to face vast new competition that will dramatically transform the Web as we know it. New websites, with more subject-specific, sometimes controversial suffixes, will soon populate the online galaxy, such as .eco, .love, .god, .sport, .gay or .kurd.
This massive expansion to the Internet’s domain-name system will either make the Web more intuitive or create more cluttered, maddening experiences. No one knows yet. But with an infinite number of naming possibilities, an industry of Web wildcatters is racing to grab these potentially lucrative territories with addresses that are bound to provoke.
Who gets to run .abortion websites — people who support abortion rights or those who don’t? Which individual or mosque can run the .islam sites? Can the Ku Klux Klan own .nazi or will a Jewish organization run the domain for educational websites — say www.antidefamation.nazi? And who’s going to get .amazon — the Internet retailer or Brazil?
The decisions will come down to a little-known nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., whose international board of directors approved the expansion in 2008 but has been stuck debating how best to run the program. Now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is on the cusp of completing those talks in March or April and will soon solicit applications from companies and governments that want to propose and operate the new addresses.
These online territories are hardly free. The price tag to apply is $185,000, a cost that ensures only well-financed organizations operate the domains and cuts out many smaller grassroots organizations, developing countries or dreamers, according to critics. (Rejectees get some of the application fee returned.) That’s on top of the $25,000 annual fee domain operators have to pay ICANN.
Peter Dengate Thrush, chair of the ICANN board of directors, argued that the steep application fee is based on the nonprofit’s bet that it’s going to get sued, and to protect against cybersquatters.
Meanwhile, the Internet’s supply of unique numerical IP (Internet protocol) addresses is about to run out. That means the Internet must now switch to a new address protocol. It’s a bit like an overpopulated area code that’s out of phone numbers.
The current system, IPv4 (version 4) uses “dotted quads” — four numbers separated by periods. The new system, IPv6, uses 128-bit addresses. A typical IPv6 address might be: 2001:0db8:0234:AB00:0123:8a2e:0370:7334. It can handle a huge number of addresses, 340 undecillion. That number can be expressed as writing 3.4 followed by 38 zeroes, said David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a San Francisco company that translates domain names into numbers.
June 8 has been designated as the ultra-nerdy “Test Flight Day” when Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other major companies will offer content over IPv6 to motivate ISPs, hardware makers, operating system vendors and others to handle the new addresses.
The San Francisco Chronicle contributed to this report.
