New Domain Names! ICANN allows the purchase of custom top level domains

ICANN, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Which manages the Internets top level domains, has released news that they will be alllowing the purchase of custom top level domains. For those of you that don;t know what a top level domain is, it's the few letters that follow the url and the "." - for example ".com" ".org" ".gov"

At the moment ICANN regulates the TLD's that can be used. They are the ones you see every day. Now they are going to allow companies to purchase their own top level domain. So let's say "money" bank wanted a new domain name. They could purchase money.bank and when people went to money.bank in their web browser they would be able to visit the company's website.

This is an interesting idea but it's just going to lead to more confusion on the Internet. Sometimes it's already hard to remember if a website is going to be website.com - website.org - website.us - website.ly - website.info - you get the idea.

The thing that should keep the average person from buying a bunch of custom top level domains is that ICANN is going to put a fee on them. Right now a .com domain can be purchased for under $20 a year. Well if you wanted a custom TLD you would have to dish out an extra $185,000 as an evaluation fee. And then you will have to pay a renewal fee every year in the 200,000 dollar range.

Fortunately this should reduce the amount of spam that is put onto the new TLD's. Without these large fee's the Internet would be an even larger mess.

What do you think? If you had the money what domain would you buy? I would want a ".matrix" domain! :)

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