Loading ...
ICANN, the first person singular ripper-off of Bob The Builder and Barack Obama’s tagline, have announced with a massive drumroll that top level domains are to be deregulated. Having braced themselves for a great swathe of handwringing, gnashing and wailing about the chaos this is bound to cause, they’re probably rather disappointed to find out that it has been met with about the same level of interest as a report on the lifecycle of the Gaboon viper at an Apathetics Anonymous meeting.
You see, it’s all very well to gush about how we’ll all have sites at .sausage or .codswallop, but will it actually make a blind bit of difference? When was the last time anyone actually typed out a full web address instead of just putting ‘wikipedia’ or ‘coprophilia-related blogs’ into the Google search bar? And I have a funny feeling that everyone will just stick to the good old .com in any case, because it’s so ingrained in the web psyche. Even my mum, who once panicked that she was going to be arrested because the computer said it had just performed an illegal operation, knows enough to type in whatever she wants with .com on the end. True, the internet isn’t quite sophisticated enough to deal with
www.picturesofthatblokewhowasinthatfilmyouknowtheoneImeanthemanwiththehair
wasnthealsointhattvprogrammewiththatwomanaswell.com but it’s only really a matter of time.
Still, it’s best to keep up with the times, and in the interest of staying a la (Depeche) mode, I’m sure that Very Poor will have its own top level domain name any time soon. Any ideas, folks? Perhaps a simple .blog, or for the nostalgic, .shit . Maybe in an attempt to attract some slightly nearer and slightly less taken eco-girls to the site, he could go for .italianstallion . The world really is your bivalve mollusc.
If anyone has £100,000 kicking around, and fancies buying me www.littlezoe.wench, I’d be much obliged.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under General, or uncategorized due to sloppy editing, Zoe's Tropes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Good post, LZ - a very interesting topic; n0t, as you point out, so much for the issue itself, but for the way it’ll affect the spam-receiving porn-viewing plural-apostophising internet user at large.
I’d imagine that, as with the early days of e-mail or Facebook, the launch of the new domains will be characterized by lots of people initially revelling in the Noel’s -House-Party-fun-loving-wacky-japester goofiness of it all, and then quickly getting bored. “Ooh look! You can have a virtual snowball fight by e-mail!” “Wow! I can throw an imaginary duck at my friend(s) on Facebook!” “Lorks-a-lordy! I can register my company name with the domain “youdonthavetobemadtoworkherebutithelps!” Followed shortly by “Actually, this is all quite crappy, isn’t it?”
Strikes me that there’s plenty of scope for invention in the existing system; not only (as Nathan Barley pointed out) can you register yourself as a company in the Cook Islands and employ the suffix “.co.ck”, you can also use the existing 2-letter suffixes for all the puerile amusement you might want. Why, even within the EU we have the possibility of:
http://www.jeremyclarksonisatw.at
http://www.razorlightaresh.it
http://www.georgeosbornehandsomewillnever.be
http://www.sarkozyestmer.de
http://www.borisjohnsonisanar.se
http://www.tafkassyous.uk
(etc etc….)
George Osborne slander aside, that was absolutely fantastic. Consider this arse laughed off.