Recently, there has been a buzz that short .com domains are rarely available or are too scarce. With ICANN’s approval of the new gTLD’s (generic Top Level Domain) there is no longer any need for businesses to worry; well big business at least. Large enterprises can now have a domain name reflecting their trademark. For example, NIKE is going to be allowed to have the extension .NIKE and Apple will be allowed .APPLE. Just to be clear, it’s not only an issue of “allowed”. ICANN has approved the domain extension, however, these businesses will still need to apply for approval via a 200 page application and pay a hefty fee for this domain name. The fee for the domain extension is $185,000 plus a $25,000 annual fee to be paid to ICANN. ICANN has also clearly stated on their website that individuals and sole proprietors will not be accepted to participate in this new program.

Today there are 22 domain extensions such as .com, .net .org etc and another 250 country level domain such as .uk(England), .de(Germany) and .cn (China) etc. ICANN is the company responsible for coordinating unique identifiers on the internet. In order to reach a website, you need to type in a name or number to reach your destination and ICANN regulates those extensions. ICANN hopes that with the introduction of this new program, users will be able to search for things more intuitively. For example, if they are looking for a restaurant, then it may end in .food. Or if they want to review a movie say for example, Avatar, they can look up www.avatar.movie. This would be a domain name that the FOX Corporation (the company that funded the movie) could have the option of buying.

Currently, .com is the most popular domain extension worldwide with .org and .net following close behind. This has been the case for years but with this new domain extension, ICANN expects at least 500 new suffixes to be created over the next year.