Name Awards

Icann, You Can, We all can. But when?

Thanks to the internet and domain names, the whole field of naming has grown dramatically. It is therefore only appropriate that early this year we give the governing international body, Icann, a suitable name award and shout out. Unlike other joint international quasi-government ventures, this one has to perform – in both growth and in a timely manner. And they have to do it in a field that is growing exponentially, which has a lot of public and private stakeholders, and has attracted a big number of sharks and even crooks.

To date the whole internet runs on only 21 general top level domains. Worldwide that is not many – but for many of the general public you are lucky if they know more than .com, .org and .edu. Especially in the USA, they don’t even know there is a .us!

Would someone out there care to sponsor me attending ICANN meetings this year?  I will carry your banner to Mexico, Australia and Seoul. How about next year too… on to Africa, Latin America and Europe. Yes, it is a very, very international body. In fact, the news back in November that they were going to open up the whole spectrum of names generated a lot of news here to do with trademark protection, but realistically, the only top-level domains on fast-track for this year are those to satisfy international language needs.

For too long they have labored under the poorest alphabet of only 26 characters.  I am especially looking forward to the day when I can have a website with a name like www.branding.olé. Won’t that be fun? Stay tuned. Gracias. Mercí.

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