Personal domain names up for grabs

Intellectual property law specialists AJ Park say they are accepting preregistrations for a new series of internet personal domain names.

The ".name" domain will go live on December 13.

Damian Broadley of AJ Park, says the new domain names are aimed at personal users rather than business or commercial users who typically use addresses ending with .com, .org, .info, or .biz.

"The .name domains are being promoted to personal users as permanent web or e mail addresses which are easy to remember and give an ongoing digital identity in the new digital world.

"There are predictions that personal domain addresses will be used in the future as a digital identifier for everything, like phone numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, logins for e-commerce etc., because once allocated they do not change. Whether this eventuates, remains to be seen."

Mr Broadley says first and last names are required for a .name registration (firstname.lastname.name).

"For example, if your name is John Smith, you could have john.smith.name or j.smith.name or smith.john.name or you can use numbers as well, like john.smith3.name."

Mr Broadley says the cost of registering a personal domain under the .name address is likely to be similar to that of existing domain name registrations.

Registration can be done through any ICANN Accredited Registrar (ICANN is a non-profit organisation that governs domain names for the whole of the internet), and a list of registrars can be found at www.gnr.com.

Broadley says, if there is more than one genuine request for the same .name address, they will be allocated on a random basis.