While .com has been the way we expect most websites in the United States to end, it appears that may be a thing of the past in the very near future.
iCann, the internet’s governing body when it comes to domain names has cleared the way for all sorts of different .endings to begin being used as early as November of 2013. Of course, the ability to get your website name such as burgers.newyorkrestaurant will not be cheap. Beginning in the middle of January of 2012 people will be able to submit their applications for Top Level Domains (gTLDS) and the application fee will cost $185,000 per gTLDS. The registration application process will close four months after it opens and iCann has said that there will be a maximum of 1,000 new gTLDS’ per year.
iCann did not take this particular decision lightly. The actual decision to release the ability to have more domain names was arrived at after over three years of deliberation and public comment. The committee finally approved the move with a 13-1 vote in favor and many on the committee believe that this particular decision will lead to innovative competition for different names.
At the very least this kind of move is going to make search engines a little more valuable than they currently are. We would imagine that all the new features that Google has recently launched will come in extra handy, considering that your favorite restaurant may not longer be sporting a .com domain when 2013 comes to an end. Companies like Woolik, who are simply trying to build on the success that Google has wrought could also laud this as welcome news simply because people looking for all sorts of things on the net will be more apt to do searches, born out of a lack of certainty as to what one company’s domain name might be after the switchover.
While there are those that might believe .com will die a slow death, there have been other Top Level Domains that were supposed to take off and never did. Two big time gTLDS in .info and .biz never really took off and are now considered domains to stay away from. In the end, the new names might be used by some, but .com has become so synonymous with website names that it could retain popularity even after the changeover.
