Commercial travel services companies have been able to apply for .travel domain names for a couple months now. Non-commercial travel entities, such as globetrotters, cannot register the domains. Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practicle Nomad travel books, has been fighting ICANN about this issue since the idea of a .travel domain gained momentum a couple years ago. He’s making progress.
This brings up a bigger issue to me. Do we really need industry specific domains like .travel and .jobs? Is company.travel better than company.com? Only in rare circumstances. Is Argentina.travel better than ArgentinaTravel.com? I don’t think so. The .jobs domain will only have value if all major companies adopted it and moved their jobs information to the extension (e.g. dell.jobs, microsoft.jobs). Then users would know they could just type in company.jobs to find employment information. I doubt this will ever happen. It’s also difficult for the registries to make money on restricted domains. Witness EnCirca, the registry for .pro domains. The domain was originally restricted to second level domains and were only available to licensed professionals. EnCirca was never going to make money with these restrictions. They found a loophole in their contract with ICANN and now offer top level domains such as marketing.pro without the licensing requirements.
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