Esther Dyson Calls B.S. On Fresh Top Level Domain Names

Founding chair of ICANN’s board states fresh TLDs are a waste of money.

On the way into work this morning I heard yet another note regarding fresh top level domain names, this time on NPR.

The note interviewed Esther Dyson. Among her many experiences was being the founding chairwoman of ICANN.

So what did she have to say regarding fresh top level domain names?

“I think it’s kind of a useless market,” she states, “and if I had $185,000, I’d spend it on something else.”

… “Nobody’s creating fresh value here,” Dyson states, “They’re just selling words.”

Ouch.

The story also interviews Forrester analyst Jeff Ernst. Ernst gives an example of how fresh TLDs enable innovation for brands:

So not only is Canon now going to be dot-Canon,” he states, “but Canon can now issue secondary domains to every one of its camera owners, and what they might very well do is embed a chip in their cameras that link that camera owner to their ID so that as they’re taking photos they could just be automatically uploading photos to a photo-sharing site. I mean, that’s just one possibility.”

Yes, it’s a possibility. In fact, it’s possible today with the plain old Canon.com domain name. It would just be at the third level instead of the second. (And in fact, that would be a lot cheaper since Canon will have to pay 25 cents to ICANN for each second level domain it registers. Third level name.canon.com domains? Those are free.)

What does Dyson have to say regarding .canon?

“Canon.com works fine, as far as I’m concerned.”

I wouldn’t discourage a brand from applying for a top level domain name. The price is peanuts to a big firm. But let’s not pretend examples like this — which I hear over and over — are something that is only enabled with the introduction of fresh TLDs.

Will there be innovation with fresh TLDs? It’s entirely possible. I just hate to hear examples of innovation that aren’t innovative.