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If you have an email address, then someone, somewhere will have asked you to sign up for a .biz domain by now. You may even have handed over your credit card details in confident anticipation of becoming the proud owner of arts.biz or thenational.biz or even biz.biz. Well don?t design the website yet, because your chances of getting anything other than the most obscure or precise address when the new top level domains go live on October 1 are slim indeed.
cornexchangecambridge.biz is probably yours if you want it, but artsonline.biz could easily end up costing the Arts Council England the same four-figure sum as artsonline.com.

The new domain will sit alongside the well-known .com as one of the Internet?s top level names, used to identify organisations and individual computers. National domains, like our own artsprofessional.co.uk, will continue of course, and in many ways it does not really matter what your name is as long as people can remember it and type it into a Web browser or use it in an email address.

However many large corporations are worried about their names or trademarks being used or abused online. The Coca- Cola company will want coke.biz, and they will get it because they have a trademark and expensive lawyers. The problems come when US and UK companies with the same name want the same domain, or when people want so called ?generic? domain names like wine.biz or art.biz.

It?s too late now to apply for a the first lot of .biz domains ? pre-registration closed last week ? but once it is active in November you?ll be able to get .biz (and the less attractive .info) just as you get .com or .co.uk. It may only succeed in making the Internet a more complicated place, but we need to know it?s happening. If you did pre-register then you?ll hear soon whether you got your choice: the company running the new domain have run it as a lottery, so if more than one organisation applies for a specific domain then it is allocated randomly unless only one applicant has a trademark claim over the name. The whole process has been widely criticised, and there are going to be many thousands of court cases when the results are announced.

.ART was first published in Dispatched, the fortnightly news and jobs email from ArtsProfessional. Register free at http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk