Revenue of $9.8 billionn possible from 100% acceptance of new domain names: Study

Kim Arora / TNN / Updated: Apr 12, 2017, 11:41AM IST

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Revenue of $9.8 billionn possible from 100% acceptance of new domain names: Study

NEW DELHI: If you happen to be one of those who have begun using new top level domain names on the internet, like .club or .sucks, chances are you have discovered that there are some web forms or applications that still do not accept your website address or email addresses yet. These web applications are yet to be programmed to identify addresses ending in domain names other than “.com”, or “.in” or “.org” etc as valid addresses. A new study commissioned by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) finds that the monetary benefits of ironing out these technical wrinkles – what they call “universal acceptance” -- stands at $9.8 billion per year globally in the first year itself.

The ICANN, a non-profit that manages and coordinates web addresses, started expanding domain names in 2013. This included generic top level domains or gTLDs like .club, .blog etc and also TLDs in languages that use scripts other than the Latin – for example, dot bharat in the Devnagri script. There were 22 domain names in use in 2012. The number went up to 1200 at last count in 2016. And the list is growing. The study finds an acceptance rate of new gTLDs or generic top level domains to be at 96%. The same for Internationalised Domain Names, or domain names in non-Latin languages, stands at 80%.

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The study, released on Tuesday and conducted by consulting and research firm Analysys Mason, calculates the profit based on e-commerce projections and through revenue generated by new and existing users of new domain names. It takes the current average of e-commerce revenue generated per email per year -- $360 – and projects it to email addresses on new domain names that are yet to find universal acceptance. With this, they come to a figure of $3.6 billion per year. The rest of the $6.2 billion, says the study, will come from internet users taking up domain names non-Latin languages.

Having software and web applications accept and recognise these new domain names as valid is a task that falls under the purview of what is called the Universal Acceptance Steering Group within the ICANN. Its chair, Ram Mohan says this problem is easy to fix and companies, particularly tech companies like Yahoo and Google who have fixed it, treated it as a minor bug. “The cost of fixing this is actually very low. This problem can be solved in a matter of weeks,” he told TOI over phone. Mohan is also the executive vice president and CTO of Afilias, a domain name registry.

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