Domain industry is coming back after Christmas and New Year’s holidays. While nothing big has happened yet, analysts argue what is waiting for the domain business in 2017 and recent future in general. Renowned expert Andrew Allemann published a curious but quite disturbing forecast on his blog DomainNameWire. According to him, domain industry is too busy arguing whether the new gTLDS are a threat to “the old” ones and pay no attention too much more real danger that threatens the whole existing domain system.
He is talking about the development of voice assistants, such as Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Echo. However, the problem is not usage of the voice itself, but in the principles of work of the Artificial Intelligence. Allemann gives a simple example – a user needs to buy flowers. Obviously, the user would search first and then visit several webpages, automatically paying attention to their domain names. Now let’s imagine that a voice assistant tells him: “Your mom’s birthday is in a week. Would you like to order flowers with delivery for under $30?” And if the user says “Yes”, then the AI does everything else. The AI doesn’t care whether the domain is “old” or new, how beautiful, significant, short or long it is, etc. Any of these names for the AI is just a sequence of symbols.
According to Andrew Allemann, it undermines the principles of domain investors’ work; they are used to buying names on the basis of their possible value, however, for the Artificial Intelligence the value of all domain names is the same. Allemann believes that the domain business should work together to make users understand that interesting and catchy domain names are still important. Otherwise, as soon as in 2017 many domain investors can expect serious disappointments and loss.
