.google .bmw .isgreat - Will Anyone Use The New Domain Names? 4 Predictions

For those of you that don't keep up with the day-to-day dealings of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, you might be surprised to see on the news that .com is "on it's way out".  That's because ICANN -- the official international arbiter of such Internet necessities as domain extensions, IP address block assignments, and Internet protocol registries -- is changing the way that top-level domain names (TLDs) work.

Once upon a long long time ago, there were only a few TLDs -- .com for commercial registrants, .edu for schools, .gov for political groups, .mil for military sites, .org for noncommercial organizations, and .net for meta-Internet groups like ICANN itself.  For political reasons, however, the only three that ever had their categories enforced were .edu, .gov, and .mil -- somehow, .com, .net, and .org became available to absolutely anyone to do whatever they wanted with.

Since then, ICANN has slowly trickled out more TLDs for the masses, including the ever-ridiculed .info, some sponsored TLDs like .aero and .tv for specific industries, and a few odd geographical TLDs like .asia and .cat (for sites in the Catalan language, which isn't associated with any particular country.)  But on June 20th, 2011, that all changed for the dramatic.

Today, anyone with the dough can purchase their own TLD.  The focus is largely on major corporations, which are expected to purchase TLDs for two reasons.  The first is advertising: it's hard to beat a domain name like drink.more.pepsi or drive.a.bmw.  The second is security: it's a lot tougher for a hacker to fake up an address at search.with.google than it is to fake up an address like google.custservice.com.

So why not go out and buy your own name as a TLD?  Pretty simple: it costs $185,000 to register a TLD and $25,000 every year to maintain it.

What will these new domain names do?  Let's talk realistic predictions:

• Major corporations will almost certainly buy their own brand's TLD.  They'd be pretty silly not to.
• Because ICANN isn't necessarily supporting those brands, however, it's reasonable to assume that a few prospectors will try to snap up domains like .coke, .ibm, and .walmart only to turn around and offer them to the companies in question at inflated prices.  That could lead to some interesting workarounds on the part of the companies whose domains got hijacked.
• It's also likely that some high-end tech companies might purchase a pile of generic TLDs like .bank, .store, and .party and then sublicense them to a number of smaller organizations for a more reasonable fee.  If you can collect $1000/year from 100 different local .banks, you can make quite a profit from the deal even after the $25,000/year fee.
• Over the next decade, the prices for the TLDs will drop, but it will probably never get within reach of individual citizens outside of the Fortune 500. 

Of course, the real world is often much more chaotic than even the most sophisticated prognosticator's abilities can account for, so we'll have to see for ourselves.  The first new TLDs will come online around the end of next year, so starting around 2013, we'll see.

I wish I could buy the .peoplesearch domain though. It would probably make me authority in the search people niche J Speaking about that, I’m pretty sure you’ll want to investigate someone during the course of your life. When that happens, make sure you bookmark this page for further reference.