Time for .SLH, .LHW or .Hilton?

You're hotel brand has a well established brand name so you have long since snapped up all the variations of .com; .org, .info., .biz and maybe even .travel if you thought it would help.

Those extenders (.com, .org, etc.) are called generic top level domains, or gTLDs. They exist and are administered by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. (ICANN basically rules the internet and, in that respect, rather resembles the Starfleet Federation.)

In its 10-year existence, ICANN has approved 21 gTLDs. Shortly, that number will increase from 21 to...infinity.

ICANN is developing a system that will permit individual applicants to obtain customized gTLDs. Currently, all gTLDs are in Roman characters that resemble English; ICANN notes that "non-English speakers will have the opportunity to express the whole of a domain name in characters that look like their language."

ICANN estimates that applying for one's own gTLD will cost approximately $185,000.

You can see the benefit for many brands where now they can have the hotel name.brand name instead of subdomains or other convaluted addresses. This will be particularly helpful for the soft brands where there is always a conflict between the hotels name and the brands name.
www.slh.com/langshott could become http://www.langshott.slh/.

It also makes e-mail easier. You no longer need to remember which Hilton that guy who is just an e-mail address in your contact bookworks at.
john.smith@hilton.com could become john.smith@belfast.hilton

The only question remains about who can afford the hefty price tag! The big brands certainly but can the smaller players?

A world with unlimited gTLDs will have enormously complex implications for trademark owners and small businesses. ICANN has just finished its first round of comments on the proposal, however, I am sure there will be more.

Asian Domain Name Spam

A client of mine recently received the e-mail below.

*******************************************************
Dear Principal / CEO,

Hello!Sorry to trouble you!
We are a domain name registration service company in HongKong, which mainly deal with international company's domain name registration and disputing
in Asia.On the Sep 10,2008, Our auditing dept received an application formally from "Daredi international ltd",they claimed as your agent in Asia and consigned
by you to register following internet trademark :
domainname (clients domain name)

and the domain names:
domainname.asia
domainname.cn
domainname.com.cn
domainname.hk
domainname.in
domainname.net
domainname.tw etc...

Through our company.
According to our procedures and in order to protect your intellectual property rights, we need to send this email to the original company for confirming the
actual relationship with this company.If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other motivation to register these domain names and probably
want to do some cybersquatting. Now we have postponed this issue and have not proceeded their registration,In order not to confuse registering these domain
names,Please contact us Asap.

PS:If you are not in charge of this matter,please transfer this email to appropriate dept.

Best Regards
Sophia
Auditing Director

West Technology Limited
Tel: 00852 9566 0205
Fax: 00852 8226 1055
E-mail: sophia@westtechnology.org
Website: http://www.west-technology.net/

********************************************************
This appears to be at the very least a spam e-mail praying on fears of cyber squatting.

For the website that clued me in to it see http://www.kenkai.com/seo-blog-article-142.htm

If you want an Asian domain name seek the advice of your website deigner or SEO specialist and get them to look at a variety of the domain name providers to find the cheapest price and most flexible service.