National Ideal. Global Reality. A well chosen Domain Name

Currently, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) accredits registrars and gives them the authority to issue domain names ending with the suffixes .net, .org, and .com. Other regulatory bodies control the registration of the geographic TLD extensions, such as .ca, .uk., and so on.

As everyone knows, .com has been the traditional choice for online businesses. The majority of search engine visitors will usually try the .com version of a name before going to any other extension. And traditionally, non-profit organizations have gravitated towards the .org extension, while .net is the domain of Internet infrastructure companies.

The reasons for .com’s popularity hark back to the early days of the dot-com boom, when anything e-commerce was considered cutting-edge.

A .com address was an immediate signal that your company was trading globally, and it allowed even the smallest start-up to give potential customers the impression that they were large, well-established organizations. The advertising during last year’s Super Bowl didn’t include a single promotion without a .com URL, and it was commonly perceived that if a company didn’t have “.com Inc” somewhere in its advertising copy, they were out-of-date, behind the times, and generally not with it.

This dot-com prejudice is changing, however, and many American companies have been dumping the .com from their names, perceiving the suffix to be a liability rather than an asset following the Nasdaq crash. Although .com is far from dead, it is less to a company’s nomenclature. Over the past few months, a number of dot-coms have started eliminating the extension from their names; during the last year, InfoSpace, Yahoo!, and Excite have all dropped the .com ending in favour of brick-and-mortar names.

As well, there are distinct advantages to using a geographic TLD instead of the traditional .com, particularly if you want to be associated with a specific country. A drawback of the .com suffix is that people may not trust you if they don’t where your organization is located. In the absence of evidence to contrary, they will probably assume that your company is American. Furthermore, many consumers and businesspeople assume that a .com suffix represents a business-to-consumer (B2C) priority, rather than business-to-business (B2B).

The .com is no longer considered cutting-edge, and doesn’t necessarily add value to your company’s image; an analogy would be advertising the fact that your movie theatre has air conditioning - most people will just assume that it does! So should you attempt to register a .com name to go along with your .ca or .uk? Absolutely!