ICANN fixes embarrassing “What is a Domain Name?” mistake
Good news, everyone! ICANN knows what a domain name is!
The Org has quietly corrected a slide deck, designed as a high-level introduction to the new gTLD program’s Next Round, that seemed to mislabel the components of a domain name.
When it was first published in early September, the offending slide looked like this:
When I saw it, for a few moments I was genuinely worried I’d had another stroke or, worse, been wrong for a quarter century. Surely ICANN, the organization that oversees the global DNS, knew more about this stuff than I do?
Rather than call an ambulance immediately, I tweeted a screengrab on Twitter to get the reassurance of the four people still on that platform that I had not lost my mind.
Now, in the same ICANN deck (pdf), apparently updated September 19, the slide looks like this:
The deck is part of a “Champions Toolkit”, a bunch of freebie marketing materials made available for people who want to market the Next Round, particularly in under-served regions, on ICANN’s behalf.
The slide still doesn’t really answer the question. It shows a hostname (www.icann.org) but doesn’t show the domain name (icann.org).
Thanks Gosh they aren’t calling it URL.
Dear Google, Domains aren’t URLs
“Search or type URL”
You guys and ICANN are all wrong: This is obviously an “internet address”.
I prefer “web extension”.
CreatorSEO have a much better graphic for it at
https://creatorseo.com/why-your-domain-name-is-important-to-your-seo-and-ranking/