This will open up a whole new world of possibilities, won't it?
A quarter-century after the creation of “.com,” the agency that assigns Internet addresses is loosening its rules and allowing suffixes named after brands, hobbies, political causes and just about anything else.
Under guidelines approved Monday, Apple could register addresses ending in “.ipad,” Citi and Chase could share “.bank” and environmental groups could go after “.eco.” Japan could have “.com” in Japanese.
It's the biggest change to the system of Internet addresses since it was created in 1984. More than 300 suffixes are available today, but only a handful, such as the familiar “.net” and “.com,” are open for general use worldwide. Hundreds of new suffixes could be established by late next year, thousands in years to come.
I can't decide whether I should belong to .jerk, .pompousass, .hopeless fool or .oldfarts.
Seriously, though, isn't this going to create a big mess? If I'm trying to find something online and don't know quite what to search for, I'm comforted by the knowledge that there are just a handful of commonly used suffixes such as .com, .org., .net and .gov. Having thousands would seem to make looking around a lot messier and more complicated.
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I'm assuming that a bunch of rich guys are preparing to jump on suffixes like .ibm, .cocacola, and so forth, in order to sell them to those companies at a profit.
The best investment might be .porn.
They've been trying to get an .xxx domain for years, with the argument that it would make life easier for porn site operators. There's been a lot of objection to that, and I thought that the opposition came from prigs, who want to get rid of porn entirely. Nope. It comes from the established porn industry.
Seems like they fear that if the .xxx domain becomes available, that they'll be barred from using .com, .net and .org addresses, and their existing domains, currently worth hundreds of thousands and more, will become worthless.
There are also objections from sex education professionals, who fear their legitimate, non-titillating sites will become inaccessible, through filtering at the domain name server level. If they omit the root server for any domain, all the subdomains are unknown.
If I were Bill Gates, I would have approached Montserrat a
LONG time ago with an offer regarding their geographic domain. Their country code is .ms
dot.lib and dot.con should go very quickly as will dot.dem and dot.gop