Tech Report: Frenzy Over New Internet Domain Suffixes

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) — Dot-coms are about to get a lot more company. The organization that oversees web addresses is set to approve over a thousand new domain name endings, ranging from ".aaa" to ".zulu."

While we haven't run out of domain names exactly, plenty of brands want web addresses that are affiliated with them, such as ".google" or ".apple."

Google, in fact has registered ".lol," which I can only assume means laughing out loud for a potentially humorous site.

KCBS Tech Report:

There are about 2,000 proposals out there, but not all of them are necessarily going to be approved as there are likely to be some trademark issues.

Right now there is .com, .gov and .org, not to mention the individual countries that have their own domain endings. But it could be dot anything if someone wants to apply for it.

The California-based non-profit organization overlooking all of this is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They are sanctioned by the U.S. Government and are recognized by most governments as the official arbitrator of domain names.

They're the ones who oversee the .com and decide new top level domains. At one point they launched .travel and even .xxx for porn sites.

If you're interested, the corporation is charging an application fee of $185,000. And if you qualify, you would then pay $25,000 a year for at least 10 years for maintaining the domain.

While it doesn't come cheap, plenty of organizations have applied and I only imagine there will be some sort of conflict in who gets the desired domain when multiple groups ask for the same thing.

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