Registry of the Great Britain’s country-code domain .UK Nominet has published a map of new generic top-level domains on its webpage. Nominet CEO Russell Haworth in the accompanying text says that a rapid growth of the new gTLDs opens new possibilities for users of the global network but at the same time creates new difficulties. It was decided to create this map to deal with them.
However, implementation of this good idea frankly speaking was not so successful. The map was to vaguely repeat the map of London tube. “The lines” represent “themes” of generic domains – General, Business, Technology, Lifestyle, etc. Each domain is represented by a “station”. However, the similarity and logic in the organization of the map end there. “Transfer stations” domains often do not correspond to the intersection of topics. Overlaying this map on the real map of London tube leads to absolute confusion. Domain .CITY, for example, is somewhere else but not even close to London City. We can assume that authors of the map were using the significance of the domains and not the geography. But even domain .XYZ that is the largest among all new gTLDs by the number of registrations is placed in the suburbs of the British capital, not even close to the center. Domain .TOKIO is placed in the real London Chinatown. In short, the idea seems useful and fun but the embodiment leaves much to be desired.
