Two things that new TLDs definitely won’t “solve”

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Two things that new TLDs definitely won’t “solve”

September 11th, 2012

They won’t put a noticeable dent in phishing, nor will they alleviate the scarcity of good (.com) domain names.

There are a lot of benefits that new top level domain supporters say the web will realize when new TLDs are released.

Let me start by saying that I’m not really opposed to new TLDs at this point. They’re coming. It’s time to embrace it and the opportunities they will create.
But I get very frustrated when I see people espousing so-called benefits to new TLDs that simply don’t make sense. Not all new TLD backers make these claims, but I see them repeated often. Here are two that get my blood boiling because they’re flat out wrong.

“New top level domains will eliminate/significantly reduce phishing.”
The theory here is that people will know the web site they’ve landed on is trustworthy because of the top level domain. For example, I’ll know a Citibank web site is legit because it’s at .citi, not something.com (which may not actually be a Citi site).

The problem with this argument is that most people who fall for phishing attacks don’t realize what domain they’re on anyway. Phishing emails typically trick the user in one of two ways. They either create a URL that’s similar to the brand (such as a typo) or they mask the URL in a link.

So now let’s say .citi is available. Will the same people that today fill out a phishing form at somecititypo.com suddenly stop getting duped? Not a chance.

“People will no longer have to register bad web site names like Shpoonkle.com“
This is commonly argued as “all the good domain names are taken; new TLDs will alleviate this scarcity”.

And it’s a load of B.S.

There’s no scarcity of available domain name. Let me repeat that: there are plenty of good second level domains available.

Where there’s scarcity is in available .com domain names. And that won’t change with new TLDs.

Shpoonkle.com could have hand registered a better second level domain name in many other extensions, but it believed it needed a .com domain name.

Consider the facts:
There are 100 million registered .com domain names.

As of the end of May there were 8.2 million registered .info domains, 2.3 million .biz domains, and 15.1 million .net domains. .Co has about 1.3 million registered. .Me is under one million.

That means there are over 90 million domain names already registered in .com that people haven’t bothered with in .info. About 100 million .com domains that aren’t registered in .biz, .co, .me, etc.

There’s no scarcity in good second level domain names. There’s only scarcity in second level domains under .com.

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