A new era of Internet use is about to begin, marked by the recent decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to approve the long-debated .xxx top-level domain (TLD).
ICANN will shortly be announcing the final rules and roll-out schedule for hundreds of other new TLDs. The program will let brands, trademark holders, industry associations and entrepreneurs bypass traditional extensions and become "masters of their own domains" by acquiring and controlling their own domain suffixes such as .canon, .nyc or even .mashable.
The Benefits of New Top-Level Domains
Where domains like .com and .net have little informational value in-and-of-themselves, most of the upcoming extensions contain information about the content of the websites they support. The domain .xxx will mark sites that contain adult content, and ICANN's recently approved domain extensions in Cyrillic, Arabic and Chinese characters indicate that the content of websites using these domains is written in those scripts. In the future, locally focused websites will use their city TLD, websites on specific cultures will use their community TLD, and businesses will use their industry TLD or their own .brands.
New and more secure distribution methods will emerge with these more informative TLDs. The current model for distributing domain names using generic extensions (.com, .net, .org, etc.) has huge consumer benefits, in that anyone can get a domain name online quickly and affordably from more than 100,000 registrar and reseller websites.
However, the system also contains serious flaws....
