What can dethrone .Com?

There’s a lot of discussion about whether any of the new gTLDs will knock .com off of its perch as the highest value extension.

I have a lot invested in .com domains, so I have a personal interest in the answer.  I may also have a bias, but I know my desires won’t affect the marketplace so I want to get the right answer.  If .com is going to be dethroned, I want to know ahead of time.

The evidence so far is that .Com is as strong as ever.  The same questions were asked when .info, .biz and .pro were released.  These new extensions had no discernible affect on .com values.

In certain country, such as Germany perhaps, the local ccTLD can be as valuable, or maybe even more valuable, than the .com.  So there is evidence that there can be alternatives to .com that can compete successfully with the .com extension.  If it can happen locally in a country the size of Germany, can it happen more globally?

Let’s step back and ask what makes .Com the most valuable extension currently.  One factor has to be the expectation among the average user that a business will have a dot-com address.  This is reinforced with 95%+ of the advertising, at least in the US, promoting dot-com addresses.    And likely 95% of the interactions that users and consumers have with Internet sites, again in the US, are with sites at dot-com addresses.

So what will change that?  My powers of imagination are not strong enough to envision a scenario where another extension would be so much more desirable than .com that the majority of the Internet economy will pick up and move to a new extension.

But what about Germany’s .de example, and England’s .co.uk example, and the Netherlands .nl example, and so on.  What about the adoption of .me domains by start-ups?

What this means to me is that there can be a group with a shared identity that may adopt a different extension because within that group the culture and the expectations have adopted a new extension as an acceptable alternative to .com.  That is clearly possible with a country where the country code is already a part of their identity.  And it can be possible with different groups that actively create their own culture, such as perhaps with start-ups and .me or music lovers and .fm.

What would trigger the widespread adoption of an alternative extension by the society at large?  It may not be possible to predict.  But when the larger society is constantly reinforcing the dominance of the dot-com extension, where is the opening for another extension to take hold?

My guess is that instead of shaking .Com’s dominance, the new gTLDs will reinforce it.  The prevalence of a large number of new extensions will weaken the ability of any one of them to gain the market/mind share to challenge .com.

The best analogy was that in the beginning there was .com, .net and .org.  .Org had a separate identity for non-profits.  .Net was really a subset of .Com, as Networks were still Commercial entities.  My sense is that the extension that has been hurt the most by the release and commercialization of .biz, .info, .pro, .cc, .ws, .tv, .to, .co, etc. is .Net.  It used to be the leading alternative to .Com.  Now it is just one of many secondary extensions.

The release of dozens or hundreds of new gTLDs will create a Tower of Babel where confusion will reign, and where the desire for a common, shared language, which will be .Com, will be stronger than ever.