Mar 28, 2008
Those website addresses ending in “dot-travel” are becoming less significant or meaningful with every passing month
Have you ever been curious about the new dot-travel domain appearing at the end of some website addresses? Ever been intrigued by its significance? You needn’t be. It seems that a promising experiment has been made meaningless by greed.
The purpose of the new dot-travel domain was to designate
those websites operated by highly respectable entities, and thus to give you -- the user -- confidence that these were sites operated impartially and reliably. The new travel domain name was created by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") to remedy the cheesy actions by fly-by-night entities to grab website names which promised more than they should have.
Up until the creation of dot-travel, a great many official-sounding travel addresses were created by small and insignificant operators. A tiny little travel agency in Kansas City (this is a hypothetical example) would seize the name "KansasCityTourism.com," giving you the impression that you were accessing the public authorities in travel to Kansas City. Or a wholly insignificant bucket shop operator in London would be the first to use the name "VisitLondon.net."
To more carefully assign names to companies worthy of possessing them, to ride herd on the process, to verify and authenticate the new names, ICANN permitted a public corporation, Tralliance, to control and assign the new domain. Henceforth, when you clicked on "HongKongTourism.travel," you knew you were interacting with someone special -- namely, the Hong Kong Tourist Board funded by the city.
Guess what happened? Through maneuvers too complex to describe or understand, a group of shareholders won control of Tralliance from its original founder, and took the corporation private. They then proceeded to sell to themselves 200,000 dot-travel names and to create websites around some of them. In the words of Travel Weekly, the major journal of the travel industry, the new executives of Tralliance began treating dot-travel "as a for-profit business" rather than as a service to the travel industry.
And consequently, it is probable that the dot-travel domain will henceforth mean nothing at all. It may be that all of us are overly pessimistic, and that the folks who have taken over and privatized Tralliance have only noble goals in mind. But I doubt it. Until further notice, you should not regard dot-travel as meaning anything more than dot-com or dot-org or dot-net. A promising reform has apparently been torpedoed.
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The purpose of the new dot-travel domain was to designate
those websites operated by highly respectable entities, and thus to give you -- the user -- confidence that these were sites operated impartially and reliably. The new travel domain name was created by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") to remedy the cheesy actions by fly-by-night entities to grab website names which promised more than they should have.
Up until the creation of dot-travel, a great many official-sounding travel addresses were created by small and insignificant operators. A tiny little travel agency in Kansas City (this is a hypothetical example) would seize the name "KansasCityTourism.com," giving you the impression that you were accessing the public authorities in travel to Kansas City. Or a wholly insignificant bucket shop operator in London would be the first to use the name "VisitLondon.net."
To more carefully assign names to companies worthy of possessing them, to ride herd on the process, to verify and authenticate the new names, ICANN permitted a public corporation, Tralliance, to control and assign the new domain. Henceforth, when you clicked on "HongKongTourism.travel," you knew you were interacting with someone special -- namely, the Hong Kong Tourist Board funded by the city.
Guess what happened? Through maneuvers too complex to describe or understand, a group of shareholders won control of Tralliance from its original founder, and took the corporation private. They then proceeded to sell to themselves 200,000 dot-travel names and to create websites around some of them. In the words of Travel Weekly, the major journal of the travel industry, the new executives of Tralliance began treating dot-travel "as a for-profit business" rather than as a service to the travel industry.
And consequently, it is probable that the dot-travel domain will henceforth mean nothing at all. It may be that all of us are overly pessimistic, and that the folks who have taken over and privatized Tralliance have only noble goals in mind. But I doubt it. Until further notice, you should not regard dot-travel as meaning anything more than dot-com or dot-org or dot-net. A promising reform has apparently been torpedoed.
Write and read comments about this post.
Labels: websites
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