Is mass web confusion on the horizon?

As ICANN’s expansion of the gTLD landscape grows closer, many bloggers and tech analysts are speculating mass confusion with ensue, that people will not distinguish .food from .eat domains. Some worry that the default .com for businesses will fall by the wayside and make it difficult for users to find the sites they want.

Forget that the practice of inexperienced web users typing “.com” for anything they want instead of using a search engine is sheer ignorance that should be corrected rather than coddled. Forget even that if a company really wants people to go to McDonalds.fastfood instead of McDonalds.com, they will undoubtedly pour millions of dollars into advertising it until people are typing it in their dreams at night. Instead, we should just focus on the reality. The days of .com supremacy are far from over. There is no need to even worry about that.

What the change means for businesses is more about focusing specialties, than general corporate sites. Wyatt’s Widgets will probably still have wyattswidgets.com, but now that main site can provide a central portal to their subsidiaries: sprockets.wyatts, cogs.wyatts and anything else they can imagine. Web site owners are certainly not interested in trying to confuse users. Look for more portals, redirections and large ad campaigns rather than people haplessly tapping in cheapfood.com when they really wanted cheap.food.

Photo: SXC