The Billion-Dollar Domain Babies by E-Commerce-Times: Am I MISSING something?

There have been a lot of discussion on domain forums and blogs regarding ICANN’s plan to open up the Internet domain system and let people create any kind of TLD they can think of. Some people said its a good idea to allow all kind of extensions, while majority said its only going to confuse the web surfers when you have un-limited number of domain extensions. ICANN’s plan to introduce “dot.Anything” is perhaps another way to raise more funds for it. No one knows how its all going to play out for sure.

I have just finished reading this interesting article by ECommerceTimes. Athough overall the article is well written with lots of content and research, yet I must say that some things are over exaggerated.

Here are some quotes from the article:

The latest ICANN plan to allow the global populace to assemble an entire domain name like www.yourname.yourname as their free choice is a revolutionary and timely decision. This now opens doors to cyber-brands like “my.ibm,” “hotel.chicago,” “it.jobs,” “play.poker,” “fly.usa” or “go.dell.” Applicants will submit a non-refundable fee of US$100,000 to $500,000 for each name idea, and businesses are already jumping to get started.

A new study estimates that this new registration process would create $33 billion in fees in the first three years. The prime beneficiary will be ICANN, which operates as a not-for-profit organization, but it still would have to deliver a highly structured, high-speed service  and meet global needs.

I have no doubt the ICANN is going to be a main beneficiary. But it appears that the $33 billion fees in 3 years’ figure is grossly over-estimated. There is no way this new extension process will raise $33 billion dollars. I hope its just a typo

Here is another interesting quote from this article:

This will have a global impact and bring a new face to global e-commerce. The study also points out how in countries around the world, new national clubs of overnight billion-dollar domain name owners will emerge, all fueling the new global race.

I doubt that we will have many success stories of domain investors buying up new TLDs or domains in new TLDs. There is no way anyone can compete with the global dominance of dot-Com domain extension. The dot-Com brand value is built over 15 years and with billions of dollars of campaigns by mega companies. There may perhaps be some isolated partial success stories of the “dot.Anything” investors, but no way we are going to see over night billionaires in my opinion.

The writer Naseem Javed appear to have based lots of his conclusions on some study that he has referenced in his article. I will be highly interested to see the full details of this study and who funded this study. Until then, I will gladly say that: I must respectfully disagree with most what has been written in this article.

I think the new TLD explosion is just going to create internet ChAoS and dot.Anything will be mostly a failure.

What do you think?