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ICANN fixes embarrassing “What is a Domain Name?” mistake

Kevin Murphy, September 30, 2024, 12:42:55 (UTC), Gossip

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:

ICANN slide 1

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:

ICANN slide 2

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.


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Comments (5)

  1. 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).

  2. Reallybigidea.com says:

    Thanks Gosh they aren’t calling it URL.

    Dear Google, Domains aren’t URLs
    “Search or type URL”

  3. Matthias Pfeifer says:

    You guys and ICANN are all wrong: This is obviously an “internet address”.

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