Lasvegasweekly.com just published a post entitled “Why The .Vegas Launch is a Ridiculous Racket”
So as you can guess from the title LasVegasWeekly.com is not a fan of .Vegas
It is probably as a scathing review of any new gTLD or the program in general that I have read from a non-domain industry publication.
Its Brutal.
Here we go with the highlights:
“Now that the inane hype and local media boosterism for the new “dot-vegas” top level domain name is beginning to subside, maybe someone with some sense will listen to the truth”
“It’s a racket, a waste of money and a doomed concept that someday will make a mockery out of all those civic leaders posing around that goofy .VEGAS sign.
Seriously. It’s going to make the Las Vegas Monorail seem like a good idea.
For the uninitiated, all Internet addresses have what are called “top level domains,” or TLDs. The only ones anyone actually uses are dot-com, dot-org, dot-net and dot-info. That covers more than 63 percent of the world’s websites. Even ones you’ve heard of and maybe used—dot-gov, dot-edu or dot-mil—account collectively for less than 0.1 percent of web addresses.
That’s the territory dot-vegas is and shall always be.
Here’s why: We’re set in our digital ways, and they work pretty darn well. The web has been a mass medium for nearly two decades now, and we know how to find what we seek. If we know a web address by heart, it’s because it’s simply a brand name plus dot-com. If we’re unsure—hey, it’s hard to spell!—we Google and our link appears in a blink.
Recent history proves it’s hard to break in new TLDs.
The Internet is getting a massive transfusion of new “real estate” that almost nobody in the business world actually wanted. ICANN was implored by major trade groups around the world, as well as several U.S. senators, not to do this.
It didn’t work.
Instead, ICANN is unleashing 300 new TLDs. Most are concept words like dot-church, dot-cooking and dot-horse; a few are geographic, including dot-vegas.
And that’s why this is a racket.
The Dot-Vegas gang—aided and abetted by a technologically inept political class—have proclaimed this the newest, hippest thing on what they probably still call the Information Superhighway.
Dot-Vegas Inc. CEO Jim Trevino predicts at least 300,000 dot-vegas registrations, a ridiculous figure.
Andrew Allemann of DomainNameWire.Com set the number closer to 10,000 (though I suspect Allemann underestimates just how many suckers are out there).
Who will buy the dot-vegas names?
Likely existing brands forced to protect themselves.
Did Caesars Entertainment need rio.vegas or harrahs.vegas? No.
Will it increase either web traffic or business? No.
But they’ll shell out $50 a year for those sites—for a little while, anyhow—solely to keep them out of the hands of, perhaps, an off-shore online casino site. Right now, those sites redirect users to caesars.com. Of course.
Dot-Vegas brass make big hay out of their efforts to work with copyright owners to prevent cybersquatters from snapping up well-known names. How, then, did planethollywood.vegas and mobmuseum.vegas end up in the hands of retired Navy pilot Greg Maguire? Why is Martin Svanascini from Chicago asking me to name my price for wynnlasvegas.vegas? Why did boyd.vegas, as of last week, point to a site with porn links on it?
Former Mayor Oscar Goodman, who probably doesn’t know oscargoodman.vegas is owned by former restaurant manager James Milner, has parroted the notion that dot-vegas is great for local businesses.
The Dot-Vegas gods want you to think their crappy real estate is the next Fifth Avenue.
That’s the free market.
But make no mistake
It’s not Fifth Avenue.
It’s Siberia.
I have double checked the story and can confirm that legendary Rick Schwartz is not the author.
