Major Internet Shakeup: New top-level internet addresses come with $100,000-plus price tag

Q&A: What do the new domains mean for me?

A new land grab for internet addresses has been sparked by the governing body for domain names — but with a minimum price tag of $100,000 (£50,000) it may not be a free-for-all.

The massive shake-up in the way that web addresses are assigned, approved this evening in Paris, will mean that people can now apply for a website that ends in any collection of letters — not just the .com-type domains that have dominated the web to date.

Alphabets other than the Latin — Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic — will also be more widely represented in websites. But the new "top-level domains" , as .com and .co.uk are known, will have a hefty price tag.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) , which oversees the way internet addresses are assigned, said that the new domains would cost upwards of $100,000 to register, and will require significant resources to run.

"We are opening up new 'land' which people will be able to go out and claim — like the United States in the 19th century," Paul Twomey, the chief executive of Icann, said. "It's a massive increase in the real estate of the internet."

Internet experts said that the main beneficiaries would be city authorities (.nyc and .berlin are among the first expected to be sold); large companies who want to protect their brands; entrepreneurs who buy and sell domains, and millionaires.

The new system is the most significant overhaul of the underlying structure of the internet in many years. Websites will now be able to be written in full in 15 languages. Foreign scripts have been permitted in parts of an internet address, but the section after the final dot — where you would typically see .com, .org., or .gov — has been able to comprise only 37 characters — a-z, the digits 0-9, and the hyphen.

The relaxation of the rules is expected to inspire a new internet land grab, as companies, organisations and wealthy individuals muscle in on territory that was previously restricted to several generic domains, such as .com and .biz, as well as country codes, such as .fr (France) and .it (Italy).

Would-be applicants are advised that the process is different from registering a regular website. Top-level domains require significant equipment — including servers, routers, and databases — to run. "These new names are not going to be for mom-and-pop businesses," Dr Twomey said.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4218629.ece