Google-backed new gTLD industry group appears at WhatDomain.org
The formative domain name industry trade association that DI has blogged about a few times recently has found itself a web site.
The Google-backed initiative can be found now at WhatDomain.org, which currently carries a bit of brief information about the organization’s rough plans and a call for potential members to get in touch.
The site states:
We are organizing to help educate the world on the coming changes in the domain landscape and to support the interests of the domain name industry. We are inviting any organization with a similar interest in domains to join us in working to create and launch an organization that will enable us to work together to achieve these objectives.
The association will eventually have membership tiers and fees, but those details have yet to be arranged.
We understand that while new gTLD applicant Google is doing most of the “heavy lifting” getting the project off the ground, the company wants to go as arms-length as possible very quickly.
The first informal meeting of what may or may not become officially known as WhatDomain took place at during an intersessional ICANN meeting in Amsterdam this January.
The idea is to promote new gTLDs and domain names in general, raise the reputation of the industry and promote the universal acceptance of TLDs among software developers.
During a session here at the Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress in New York yesterday, ICANN head of stakeholder engagement Sally Costeron seemed to commit ICANN to help support the initiative.
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It is a bit ironic that Google is backing this initiative, given that Google does not even support all current TLDs. In particular, a number of Google applications (gmail for instance) do not properly handle IDN TLDs such as .рф.
Google wrote: “We are organizing to help educate the world on the coming changes in the domain landscape…”; they should make sure all parts of their own company are aware that “the world” includes people who don’t use the Latin alphabet.
Avtal