APRIL 25, 2005

ICANN approves .jobs and .travel Internet addresses

The Internet has two new top level domain names: .jobs and .travel. The organisation responsible for the technical co-ordination of the Internet, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), has officially designated the new Internet addresses.

As their names suggest, .jobs is created for the use of personnel businesses and .travel for the holiday industries. Such names are a way of mapping unique IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to more memorable name equivalents. It means, for example, that www.A1HumanResources.jobs could become the URL for a business called A1HumanResources, in addition to any .com equivalent that may already exist.

The registry operators that will control allocation of the domains to end-users are Employ Media and Tralliance Corporation. In other words, A1HumanResources would have to pay money for one of these companies to officially register its .jobs URL to ensure that users anywhere on the Web can correctly locate the company website, or email system.

But ICANN doesn't intend to stop there. It says it has already entered into commercial and technical negotiations with candidate registries for .cat, .post and .mobi domains. And discussions are also continuing within ICANN over another five top level domains: .asia, .mail, .tel and .xxx.

Back in December 2002, ICANN also added .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro to the original .com, .net, .org and country domains.

One of the most outspoken critics of the proliferation of domains is the inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Speaking at the World Wide Web Conference in New York back in May 2004, he argued that adding additional domain names didn't have the effect of widening their scope but merely devalued the existing domains. 'When you print money, you devalue the money you have already printed,' he told the conference.

At the time he argued that other expansions, such as .info and .biz, have only served to boost the profits of the registries as speculators tried to cash in on potentially lucrative domain names and major companies sought to protect their brands by buying up new versions of their brand names alongside the .com, .net and .org they might already own.

'It would be great if new domains were opened, but ones with social or technology context that make a commitment to the social system and to the integrity of that piece of the Web,' he said.

In case you are wondering exactly what ICANN does, its main responsibility is for managing the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) to make sure that every officially allocated address is unique and that Internet can access all valid addresses. At a technical level this means overseeing the distribution of unique IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and making sure that each domain name maps to the correct IP address.

What are your thoughts on the new domains? Will they help give structure to a chaotic Internet or are they just a money-making scheme that will add to confusion? Leave your comment by clicking on the link below.

Alun Williams