Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are essentially specific destinations for brands. Companies will be able to buy their brand and attach it to a URL. So instead of seeing Pepsi.com, the soda manufacturer could have Pepsi.soda or something similar. It will not be cheap to get your own TLD, with an $185,000 application fee and $25,000 a year to run the registry. Yet, some Internet advocates are crying foul, saying that gTLDs will create new headaches in cybersquatting, trademark issues and excessive spam.

The price tag for a gTLD may cut down on the overall instances of cybersquatting, except for the most affluent spam networks and domain registries. ICANN will be accepting applications for new top-level domains between January 12 and April 12, 2012.

ICANN is providing safeguards to ward off mass cybersquatting. The Applicant Guidebook has gone through seven significant revisions since 2008 that incorporated 1,000 or so comments from the public. The evaluation procedures provide for background screening of pre-applicants that measure business history and look for history of cybersquatting. It will conduct string-similarity reviews to determine if the domain is like anything else currently on the Internet and assess the potential security risks of creating a new TLD.

There are currently 22 TLDs that range from the original .com to .org and .net. ICANN's final approval of the gTLDs will certainly make that number skyrocket but the question is what the final affect on the Internet will be. Are gTLDs the first salvo in a new Web land rush or will it be a source of new innovation for the next decade of Internet development?

The Biggest Thing to Happen to the Internet Since .Com?

Forrester analyst Jeff Ernst believes this is one of the biggest things to happen to the Internet.

"I think this is probably the biggest change to the the Internet since we have had it," Ernst said over the phone. "A lot of the biggest brands are figuring out the requirements. It makes a lot of sense as a brand owner to have as much control over your brand as possible. Why be stuck behind .com when you can own your own primary domain and control the secondary domains you issue within your domain?"

Ernst points out that there are stringent technical guidelines to obtaining a gTLDs and the ability to administer it. There is a nine-month application process and brands must have the ability to effectively administer secondary domains. This could increase corporate IT spending as brands feel the need to get their own TLDs but then must adhere to ICANN's policies.

"Many of the biggest brands are planning to apply for their .brand TLD, but many marketing leaders I've talked with look at this as a nuisance and are skeptical about whether Internet users will embrace them," Ernst said in a blog post.

Lauren Weinstein, the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility lambasts ICANN in a blog post, calling ICANN and the domain registries the "Domain Industrial Complex" and calling shame to all that helped approve this decision.

"Has the horrific economic saga of the last few years taught us nothing?" Weinstein wrote. "Is there no sense of ethical or moral outrage among those persons who are truly concerned about creating the best possible future for the entire Internet and Internet community, not just for a comparatively few "domain exploitation" tycoons and would-be tycoons?"

As it currently stands, a site in Saudi Arabia must use ".sa" as its root. Now it can use the Arabic equivalent and leave off translating. Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are the first to take advantage of this.

Now, however, 21 countries have made the request that the Internet recognize their names in 11 different languages, according to an ICANN announcement.

The process to get native-language functionality, called "Fast Track" has three steps.

1. Preparation (by the requester in the country / territory). Community consensus is built for which IDN ccTLD to apply for, how it is run, and which organization will be running it, along with preparing and gathering all the required supporting documentation.
2. String Evaluation: incoming requests to ICANN in accordance with the criteria described above: the technical and linguistic requirements for the IDN ccTLD string(s). Applications are received through an online system available together with additional material supporting the process at: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/
3. String Delegation: requests successfully meeting string evaluation criteria are eligible to apply for delegation following the same ICANN IANA process as is used for ASCII based ccTLDs. String delegation requests are submitted to IANA root zone management.

A new "domain purchasing feature" provides a one-click on-site way to avoid what Posterous' Vincent Chu called "the geeky details" of securing and applying a personal domain to your account.

Instead of mucking about in the guts of your personal branding engine, this push-button domain machine avers to do it all for you. A big deal? Just a deal of modest proportion, in keeping with the simplicity the service emphasizes.

Tumblr, Posterous' biggest competitor, also offers custom domains but not through its own site and not integrated with Google.

We cannot stress enough how important it is to choose a good name when you've found it. Below is an updated list of great companies with bizarre names or domains. Consider this a cautionary tale.

2. Twubs.com: Twubs is the hash tag-based aggregator that helps event planners broadcast a live conference stream and organize event-related social media. Surprisingly this event assistant runs faster than he looks.

3. fTags.com: This site provides real time twitter streams on niche topics and aggregates them to one place. Unfortunately an ftag sounds a lot like a "tramp stamp", so if it were up to us we'd be aggregating your tweets to a tattoo elegantly etched above your buttocks.

4. BLEWS: We last mentioned Microsoft's BLEWS in an article on media bias deconstruction. The name is a portmanteau of blogosphere and news. For a brilliant project built on the principles of natural language processing, the name doesn't just blow in the present tense, it blew and continues to do so with grammatical errors.

5. Putacart.com: This site is best known as the shopping cart widget that goes anywhere. Something tells us Spanish language users might not want to go there without a condom.

If you've got more nominations for bizarre names, add them to the comments below.

Photo credits: Dennis Mojado,

Ironically, it's the fact that you can't buy domain names that makes Domain Pigeon so nice to use. Traditional domain services actually restrict your ability to research names by showing you a few domains at a time based on your searches. Why? For a very simple reason: once you search and find a domain, you're more likely to buy one for fear of losing it.

But because Domain Pigeon is passing you through to another service - and picking up an affiliate kickback - there's no harm in showing you everything at once. You get the freedom to look at a wide variety of domains and, should you decide to buy, Domain Pigeon still sees revenue. Win, win.

But don't think all of the pressure is off. Domain Pigeon still does a nice job of motivating you to purchase by showing you how many other people are currently interested in that domain name. For example, 16 people are currently interested in purchasing illpe.com, so if you were building illpe, you might want to hurry.

The next time you're still looking for that perfect domain name, try Domain Pigeon. At the very least, it will spark some ideas. At best, you may walk away with the perfect - albeit unintelligible - .com name for your new venture.

We're looking forward to reviewing reakd, tchdo, ofgar, ainxx, and rpayi in the not too distant future.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.

Update: ICANN just approved these changes.

The new rule proposes a $50.000 to $100.000 fee for the registration of one of these new domain names, effectively restricting their availability to larger organizations.

This new plan would have a number of ramifications, but maybe most importantly, the domain name speculation business is going to be changed forever. Most interesting and generic .com names have long been taken. The new system, however, will bring an abundance of new domains, which might drive down prices for .com domains. This is surely going to upset a lot of speculators, as Chris Morrison also points out on VentureBeat. Right now, speculators can hoard interesting domain names and auction them off for millions of dollars (business.com sold for around $350 million).

Will Consumers Care?

In the past, ICANN slowly added a number of new top-level domains such as .info, .mobi, .travel, .coop, or .asia. None of these gained a lot of mind-share among consumers and can often be bought at a discount because demand for them is so low. For the average Internet user, .com is the only domain on the Internet, with only .edu, .gov, .org, and .net having some traction as well. Not coincidentally, these (together with .mil) were also the first TLDs available on the net.

The question is if these generic TLDs will be more successful. If consumers didn't adapt to .info, will they adapt to .coke? The .com domain has become so ingrained in our Internet culture that it has practically become synonymous with domain names and the Internet as a whole.

While some web services like del.icio.us were able to attract a considerable amount of users with their idiosyncratic domains, even del.icio.us finally bought delicious.com when it started attracting more mainstream users.

It looks like these questions might get answered pretty soon. Judging from ICANN's timeline for the introduction of generic TLDs, we could start seeing them as early as Q2 of 2009.

It's not surprising that China's web site ecosystem is seeing such huge growth -- their Internet user population is as well. In February, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information reported that the country had 221 million Internet users, which means that it has effectively passed the United States as the world's largest net population. And there's still a lot of room to grow -- China only has about 16% of its population on the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, compared to 71.4% of Americans who are online.

In our 2008 web predictions, Richard MacManus predicted that this would be a break out year for China on the Internet. "The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won't happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia (China, Japan, Korea)," wrote MacManus. "At least one startup from China will break through in the US market with Twitter-like success in 2008 - and it will almost certainly be a Mobile Web app."

We haven't had a Twitter-like success come out of China year (it's still early in 2008, though), but China is definitely experiencing a web boom. Doing business in China, however, can be very tricky. Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, a company that has had a tough go in China, said that doing business in other countries was difficult because of legal "gray areas." Google has also taken heat for cooperating with Chinese censors.

The service makes it remarkably easy for anyone to create OpenID accounts through their own domain, using the MyOpenID authentication service.

How It's Done

MyOpenID for Domains lets you set up OpenIDs in one of two formats: Wildcard subdomains like member.yourdomain.com or as a single subdomain + path like openid.yourdomain.com/member.

I chose the single subdomain plus member path because I want to be able to use other subdomains for other purposes.

It's really easy to set up either path. For my Wordpress blog I just filled out the form below, then I had to call my webhost (Bluehost - great customer service, terrible uptime) and ask them to make a small edit to my DNS record. I gave them this information:

Name: openid.marshallk.com
Type: CNAME
Value: www.myopenid.com

They made the change needed, basically setting up a redirect, in less than 5 minutes. Other hosts will let you edit your own DNS info. I then posted a page on my blog with a particular URL and a short code for MyOpenID to detect. That's it - I was done. Now I can use my own domain name as an OpenID. The next step was to make sure that my user identity page was looking spiffy.

If MyOpenID ever closes its doors, it will be easy for me to edit my DNS record back and keep my OpenID URL from becoming a 404 out of my control. I'll also now be able to verify that I am in fact the owner of marshallk.com.

Limitations of the Service

This is the easiest way I've found to use my own domain name as an OpenID. There are other ways to do it but they've always given me far more trouble than they should. This service from MyOpenID is also an easy way to offer and administer OpenID accounts to other users of a particular website.

MyOpenID is a good OpenID provider. MyOpenID for Domains does require that you use their service in particular, however. There are many different OpenID providers offering many different advanced features. Check out SpreadOpenID.org for a comparison of many different providers.

As you can see below, my MyOpenID profile is now tied to my domain. All I need now is the ability to put HTML links in my summary info, display recent items in an RSS feed of my choice on this page and some other customization options. Then I'll be doing great.

Watch this space for more forthcoming news on big increases in OpenID usability.