That question just became more than academic.

Under the new plans, domain names can be based on any string of letters.

Individuals will be able to register a domain based on their own name, for example, as long as they can show a “business plan and technical capacity”.

Companies will be able to secure domain names based on their intellectual property.

Welcome to the age of dotAnything. The new virtual land rush begins in 2009. Wonder what crazy new applications people will find for new TLDs. Place your bets on which new TLDs will survive market forces.

Hope somebody makes .EXE domains available. Now that would be nostalgic. It would make a great domain extension for Web apps.

Post from: EveryJoe

ICANN Opens TLDs

I once mindfucked some n00bs by registering their .com, .net, and .org domain names and redirecting them to one of my sites. They were so clueless, it took them months to figure out what happened.

They shat bricks when they found out. It was a laugh riot.

Unfortunately, repeating that little prank could get ridiculously more expensive as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) mulls opening up the top-level domain (TLD) system. That means aside from the seven original TLDs (.com, .org, .net, .edu, .mil., .gov, .int), the 200+ country code TLDs, and the handful of newer TLDs (.biz., .info, .pro, .museum, etc.), ICANN could allow an explosion of .anything.

Under the current rules, just applying to register a new TLD costs $50,000. That doesn’t even guarantee approval; .xxx was rejected last year. That could all change this week.

Two sides to the debate, of course: some say let a thousand flowers bloom, some say prevent a thousand headaches now. Many businesses already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually protecting all their possible domain names. On the flipside, good old market forces weed out TLDs nobody cares about.

That probably doesn’t matter to you, though. What matters is whether you will register new domain names within these new TLDs — or, if you have the dough, actually register whole new TLDs. So will you get in on this new virtual land rush?

Post from: EveryJoe

Will You Register New TLD Names?