I noticed in the recent primaries all the candidats were using .com for their websites. Like MarkSmith.com or smithforcongress.com. You would think it would be a .org.
Or I read the World Wildlife Federation is suing the World Wrestling Federation over www.com. Now I would think the former would be a .org.
Now I see the army has a site goarmy.com. You would think that would be a .gov or a .mil (there is such a thing right?)
Now I realize .com, .org and .net are unregulated and anyone can use them. But it seems silly that the World Wildlife Federation would care about wwf.com when when it isn’t a company and the wrestling federation is. Or at least the government wouldn’t need to use a .com for their army.
And what about the new sites .biz or .name. I have yet to see any of them. Are they up yet?
I think it is more a matter of public familiarity with TLDs than anything else. And I think anything more than the big three (.com, .net, .org) are just means some people are using to graft more money from companies with a vested interest in owning all the TLDs with their name in it… like, for instance, Coca Cola or something.
As an IMHO comment, I do think that the government should stick to the .gov and .mil, or start selling them off, because WTF, it is hard enough to find good web addresses to begin with without the government buying them up.
I suspect that a large fraction of Internet users aren’t even aware that .gov, .mil, .edu and .net exist.
Lets suppose you want to visit the website of an entity known as QWERTY but you don’t know their URL. I suspect that the majority of the time you will try www.qwerty.com first.
Now, most of us here know enough to try a few other TLDs if that one fails or jump over to Google and let it find the site for us but, lets face it, a large percentage of Internet users aren’t going to do that and may not even be aware that they can do that. So, in the example you gave, someone may try to find the World Wildlife Federation website and enter www.wwf.com. When that fails, instead of trying a .org they may simply give up.
If enough people become familiar with the other TLDs this may change but I’m not holding my breath.
Even in Ireland, most (small to medium) companies I know have gone out of their way to get .com addresses, even though we’d officially be .ie. It adds some weight internationally.
.biz, .info and .name are taking registrations (I’m not sure if they resolve yet). See page on ICANN’s sitefor the official info. The other new gTLDs are