Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a plan that will open up top-level domain names to just about anything possible–so long as you’re willing to pay the price.

Early estimates put the price tag for the TLD’s at anywhere between $100,000 and $500,000, which means the .francis domain will be available for a good time yet to come.

This does open up the possibility of .xxx domains for adult themed content, which could make blocking it much easier if the sites adhere to domain. If.

But what kind of impact with the change have? In fact, the creation of more TLD’s may serve to make them even that much more irrelevant. If there are eighteen different versions of tool.com, (tool.org, tool.edu, tool.francis), what is anybody going to do except go straight for the search engine. Unless the search engines insert some consideration into the top level domain, how will it have a significant impact on most of the web?

Many of the top searches on the Internet already include top level domains in the searchwords themselves.

I can see how companies or persons with multiple names might enjoy having the last word of their name be the domain. Paine.webber, Merrill.lynch, Jason.francis. But overall, the impact appears hard to define, at least in any significant way.

Story via BBC News.

Technorati Tags: icann, top level domains, search engines