Chris Duckett at ZDNet:
The governing body of the internet, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has delegated the .monash top-level domain (TLD) to Victoria’s Monash University.
Monash Uni said the delegation only occurred after a lengthy application process and a review of the university’s technical, operational, and financial capabilities.
You know, I’m not convinced TLDs are going to be great. Let me give a hypothetical example to illustrate my caution — Monash runs a TV ad to boost applications. It ends with the tagline, “be sure to apply online at apply.monash.”
I think lots of people wouldn’t know what to do with that. Is it a web address? It doesn’t really feel like a website address. Is it a email address? A twitter account?
Sure, you can pop a ‘http://’ in front of it, or design the ad so there’s a graphic of someone typing it into a browser, but it’s not immediately self-evident like a .com, .net, or .edu.au is.
As Chris’ article goes on to say, the shift will occur gradually & no doubt there will be 301 redirects out the wazoo, but I can’t help but wonder that there’s going to a a lot of Monash support staff who’ll have this phone call:
“Yep, dot monash. No, not dot com dot au, dot monash. What do you mean what’s after monash? No, that’s the end bit. What did you write? Dubya dubya dubya monash dot com? What?
…just type monash dot edu dot au. Bloody hell.”