By Eddie Wrenn
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The internet is about to get the biggest shake-up since we first discovered .com.
ICANN, the Internet regulator which organises how we assign website addresses, has opened the doors for businesses and organisations to apply for their own ending to website addresses.
Google alone has applied for 50 new domain endings, or suffixes, such as .youtube and - most amusingly - .lol. Other companies have applied for names such as .baby, .bank, .secure
So the days of .com, .co.uk, and .net dominating the web are likely to be over - perhaps in future this will be seen as the the end of the Internet's first era.
Artemis Internet, based in San Francisco, has applied for .secure. Some 2,000 proposals have been submitted as part of the largest expansion of the Internet address system since its creation in the 1980s
Companies and organisations from North America and Europe dominate the bids for new Internet addresses.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers received 1,930 proposals for 1,410 different Internet suffixes by the May 30 deadline.
Nearly half of the proposals - 911 - were from North America and another 675 came from Europe.
ICANN plans to release details about the proposals at a news conference in London at midday.
The full list of proposed suffixes is not yet available, though bidders - who paid $185,000 per application - have disclosed some of them.
If approved, the new suffixes would rival .com and about 300 others now in use.
Companies would be able to create separate websites and separate addresses for each of their products and brands, for instance, even as they keep their existing .com name.
Businesses that joined the Internet late, and found desirable .com names taken, would have alternatives.
Google has applied for a total of 50 new domain names - including .lol and .youtube
From a technical standpoint, the names let Internet-connected computers know where to send email and locate websites.
But they've come to mean much more. Amazon.com Inc., for instance, has built its brand around the domain name.
The expansion will allow suffixes that represent hobbies, ethnic groups, corporate brand names and more.
ICANN's Vice President Jeff Moss will be present to unveil the names
Where the proposals came from in many ways mirrored where the Internet is used most. Only 17 proposals came from Africa and 24 came from Latin America and the Caribbean - areas where Internet use is relatively low.
One surprise came from the Asia-Pacific region, which had 303 proposals, or 16 percent of the total.
It was believed that Asia might get more because the expansion will lift current restrictions on non-English characters and permit suffixes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
China has the world's largest Internet population, and there was talk of creating the Chinese equivalent of '.com' and other popular suffixes.
It's possible that some of the bids for Asian suffixes came from North American or European companies.
There were 116 proposals, or 6 percent, for suffixes using characters beyond the 26 English letters.
Many of the 1,930 proposals were duplicates. Suffixes in contention are likely to include .bank, '.secure and .web.
ICANN is encouraging competing bidders to work out an agreement.
The organisation will hold an auction if the parties fail to reach a compromise.
Of the 1,930 proposals, 749 were for 229 different suffixes, while the remaining 1,181 were unique.
That means there were 1,410 distinct suffixes proposed.
After the list is out Wednesday, the public will have 60 days to comment on the proposals. Someone can claim a trademark violation or argue that a proposed suffix is offensive.
It will take at least a year or two for ICANN to approve the first of these new suffixes.
ICANN will review each proposal to make sure that its financial plan is sound and that contingencies exist in case a company goes out of business. Bidders also must pass criminal background checks.
Suffixes could potentially generate millions of dollars a year for winning bidders as they sell names ending in some of the approved names. Critics of the expansion include a coalition of business groups worried about protecting their brands in newly created names.
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How about .chav?
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I had been in communication with the authorities for years - not just ICANN but also USPTO, US Department of Commerce, Nominet and WIPO. We need .reg TLD introduced for registered trademarks to help stop customers being defrauded over the internet. They have been most evasive (putting it politely) about the solution to consumer confusion on the internet e.g. barclays.bank.uk.reg can only be Barclays bank.
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The paperwork for each submission ran to several hundred pages and there is no guarantee that an application will be accepted, although the non refundable fee's of around $185,000 +plus your costs would be enough to prevent the average person from applying..
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