Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON: A South American nation could pose the greatest challenge yet to the supremacy of the ".com" Web address if a Colombian university successfully turns the country's Internet code, ".co," into a global domain.

La Universidad de Los Andes, which has managed Colombia's ".co" country code since 1991, is inviting bids from firms that would market the domain name internationally as a convenient alternative to ".com," ".net" and other domains. The university's plan, which would help it raise money for scholarships and for investments, is part of a new rush for Web names now that good names in the popular ".com" domain are increasingly difficult to find.

Colombia's move comes as several registry companies prepare to roll out seven new domains as an alternative to ".com." Some such as ".museum" and ".coop" will be restricted to specific entities, while others such as ".biz" are designed to compete head-on with ".com."

Still, the obvious merits of the ".co" domain name in a world of ".com" saturation are its simplicity and familiarity, potential bidders said. The ".co" domain could clearly be interpreted as an abbreviation for "company," much as ".com" is meant to represent "commercial."

The Colombia country code could also prove popular among Web site owners who realize they could attract traffic from sloppy typers who leave off the final "m" in a ".com" address. "This thing has the potential to be much larger than '.biz,'" said Larry Erlich, president of DomainRegistry.com Inc., a registry based in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

But ".co" and other new domains are likely to force new challenges onto companies that must defend their trademarks in cyberspace. "It really means that everybody that has a '.com' name has to lock up a '.co' name," Erlich said. "It really is kind of holding a gun to the head of registrants."

Revenge of the country codes
The 244 country codes such as ".co" have largely taken a back seat to the generic Internet domain names like ".com," ".net" and ".gov," which were developed two decades ago, by researchers and academics mostly in the United States.

But the crowded ".com" field, now numbering 22.5 million according to figures compiled by the Internet Geography Project at the University of California, Berkeley, has created a growing opportunity for country domain names.

Unlike "global" domains like ".com" and ".org," country codes such as Germany's ".de" and France's ".fr" are assigned to specific countries and are typically not marketed to broad audiences. Canada's ".ca" code, for instance, is open only to Canadian companies or citizens.

In the past few years, some countries have opened up their domains to a global audience, marketing themselves as an alternative to the increasingly crowded ".com" namespace. The Cocos Islands, a territory of Australia with fewer than 700 residents, licensed its ".cc" country code to Seattle-based eNIC Corp., which has signed up approximately 500,000 addresses since 1997.

Los Angeles-based dotTV Corp. says it has registered 450,000 addresses in Tuvalu's ".tv" domain since last year after paying $50 million to the South Pacific island nation. The ".co" domain has already made its cyberspace debut as part of ".co.uk," a domain launched in the United Kingdom as a commercial alternative to ".com."

But that UK code is not as clean as the simple ".co" code Colombia is taking to market.

But the risks are many
Arthur Andersen, the consulting and accounting firm sent an e-mail to Internet name-registry companies on June 4 encouraging them to submit bids by July 25. But proposals will not be considered without a non-refundable $20,000 fee, according to papers on the offer prepared by the London law firm Squire, Sanders & Dempsey.

That fee is just the tip of what could be a very costly iceberg. The company that ultimately wins the rights to administer the domain will be required to make a "substantial" up-front payment in addition to the application fee, and pay annual royalties to the university after that, the offer papers say.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's top naming body, drew protests when it required an application fee of $50,000 to accompany new domain-name proposals last year. Squire, Sanders could find that many firms are reluctant to pay half that much.

"It seems kind of like a ripoff," Erlich said. Buying and promoting the ".co" franchise at a time when the world of Internet names could be on the brink of vast changes might make it a risk some may not find worth taking. In addition to the seven new global domains being introduced this year, the entire Internet domain scheme that now prevails could be replaced in the future by another system using phone numbers or precise geographical information, to cite two possibilities being considered.

"We genuinely don't know if we're going to be making a bid at this time," said Shonna Keogan, spokeswoman for Register.com Inc. in New York. Arthur Andersen and Squire, Sanders did not return calls for comment.

Money to benefit students
La Universidad de Los Andes will use its proceeds to invest in technological advances in Colombia and university scholarship for poor students, said Alfonso Mejia, vice rector of the university. The winner of the ".co" bidding will be chosen by mid-August, he said.

"The experts told us that there is a great potential there because '.com' is pretty saturated," Mejia told Reuters in a telephone interview. Unlike Tuvalu and Cocos Islands, the university is not selling the rights to its domain, just opening it to other users, Mejia said.

La Universidad de Los Andes has already registered approximately 8,000 addresses under dual domains such as ".com.co" and ".edu.co," the document notes, but has blocked further registrations.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.