This week marked the beginning of a new era as Canon announced their decision to initiate the application process for their own generic top-level domain (gTLD), “.canon”. On the micro-level, Canon was the first enterprise to take an advantage of ICANN’s New gTLD Program to apply for a gTLD to reflect their brand. But looking things on the macro-level, just think about the implications this will have for the Internet users at large!

The opportunity this offers to globally recognized brands is huge. Once the required logic has been incorporated into generally used web-browsers, the only thing a customer has to do is to type in the brand name in his/her browser. Canon and nothing else. With proper traffic analysis and good proxies, this allows the customer to be automatically forwarded to a localized website, without having to give any thought as to what the appropriate top-level domain used in connection with the brand name should be.

By running its own gTLD, an enterprise with a global brand no longer has to worry about the domain squatters that have reserved brand.xx(x) domain in some of the 200+ TLDs available to them, holding your brand at ransom. After all, as the customer only needs to type in the brand name, what user could be bothered with trying out addresses like canon.tv, a squatted Canon domain under Tuvalu ccTLD.

From the security perspetive, if a security concious enterprise has its own gTLD, it no longer has to worry about when and how it will be able to sign all its domains. If you are a global bank with its own gTLD and wish to utilize DNSSEC, you only need to provide the public key of “.globalbank” gTLD zone to the root (to be signed in 07/2010), after which the chain of trust to your own gTLD is complete. No need to worry about exchanging keys with various ccTLDs and gTLDs, reducing the administrative burden associated with DNSSEC.

Having worked with TLDs since the late 90s, we have seen this day coming for a long time. And so, on March 18 2010, we announced Nixu Registry Server, a productized Domain Name Registry Solution (DNRS) an entity needs when running their own gTLD and/or ccTLD. Nixu Registry Server is already being run in production by certain ccTLDs, so from the technology perspective there is nothing that prevents an organization from applying for its own gTLD. We are in the position to deliver an end-to-end solution for DNRS & DNS with look & feel customized to reflect your brand identity.

Better yet, we will also be happy to assume the responsibility for writing up the technical plan required by ICANN during the gTLD application process, to make sure that your investment in the application process yields a handsome return. Just contact our sales, and we’ll get you all set as far as the technology side of applying for -and running – a generic top-level domain is concerned!