Gartner, the well known IT consulting company, has published a report on the new top level domains that will appear some time next year.

The report totally misses the mark. In a pure US centric vision, it focuses on “.com” as the must-have TLD, totally overlooking the fact that a “.com” is mostly worthless e.g. in Germany, where “.de” is the TLD one must have to succeed locally. There are many countries where the local TLD has much more value than a “.com”.

The report is also clueless in that it states that “proposals previously rejected by ICANN, such as the creation of “.xxx” for adult-oriented sites, are also likely to be commercially successful“, when everybody but Gartner knows that the newly adopted rules were designed to precisely avoid the “.xxx” debacle to happen again.

Going further down the path of ignorance, Gartner also states that : “we would expect that an extension such as “.movie” would have similar value“. I am afraid “.movie”, just like “.travel” or “.name” will only have modest success, because they are focused on the English speaking market, and have little value outside North America. In this specific case, my British colleagues usually use the word “film” rather than “movie”. Looks like “.movie” will not even be able to cross the Atlantic.

How much credit you give to this report depends on the credit you give to Gartner, of course. I am afraid this one is not going to help the company’s track record. Sometimes, silence is better.