Neil Brown has prepared a paper on the coming expansion of the internet. Did you know that ICANN has plans for greatly increasing the number of Top Level Domains? At the present, we have Top Level Domains like .com. and .info. We also have special domains for countries, like .au or .uk. But it seems that virtually every good domain name in these categories is taken.

What if the domains were expanded so that they covered virtually anything? How about .food, .australiandoctors, .religion or .fairfax?

That is what ICANN is planning to do. How will it work? How much will it cost? How can you protect your own name from being taken up as a general domain name?

The issues are not finalised, but you should keep abreast of what is going on and prepare for the coming revolution in domain names and the websites that will come with them. Neil Brown's paper, which follows here, is a good start.

New Top Level Domains

In late June, ICANN - an organisation that is fundamentally involved in how all internet users interact -- held a meeting in Sydney. This meeting was one in a series of ongoing international meetings (before Sydney was Mexico in March, and after will be Seoul in October and Nairobi in March 2010). The meetings each involve members from the business, academic, government, technology, and legal sectors, all having a significant interest in ICANN's proposed changes to the ways that domain names are acquired, controlled, and used.

What Is ICANN?

The acronym ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is a not-for-profit US corporation based in California. It was formed in 1998 as a result of an initiative by the Clinton administration to better organise the internet and streamline how it works. Even though ICANN is incorporated and operates under US law, ICANN's responsibilities extend to the entire internet. ICANN's operations therefore have world-wide scope and impact.

What Does ICANN Do?

At the end of the first quarter of 2009, it was estimated that there were over 180,000,000 top level domain names registered worldwide, with 11.8 million registered in the first quarter of 2009 alone.[1]

Domain names are registered through domain name registrars, which are more or less like domain name retailers. With so many domain names being registered, there needs to be an overarching entity that organizes them, to make sure that when you type a domain name into your browser you get the website that you are looking for. This involves coordinating the domain name with a numerical code called an "internet protocol number" that attaches to the computer where the website's information is stored. If the domain name, internet protocol number, and computer are not all coordinated, then the internet user will receive the wrong information. It could end up with a different website, or nothing at all. Similarly, if this process was not coordinated properly, e-mails could inadvertently be sent to the wrong recipients, or float around in cyberspace forever.

ICANN's job is to oversee the ongoing use of the domain name system to make sure that the transmission of information runs accurately and smoothly for all internet users. It sets the rules for registrars (who must be accredited by ICANN), and can also approve or disapprove of new types of domain names, and set conditions on their registration. For example, ICANN approved the .biz domain in 2001 so that businesses could have an alternative to the crowded .com extension. In 2007, ICANN rejected a .xxx domain which was intended to be reserved for websites with adult-oriented content.

Explaining gTLDs

The acronym gTLD stands for "generic top-level domain". This is a specific type of "top level domain name".

What is a top level domain name?

Generally, a top level domain is the last set of letters after the last "dot". In the domain name www.guardian.co.uk, the ".uk" is the top-level domain name, and the ".co" is the second-level. In this example ".uk" is a specific type of TLD called a "country code Top Level Domain" ("ccTLD"). Unlike most gTLDs, ccTLDs are usually reserved for countries, and are likely to be subject to registration restrictions such as residency in that country, or a commercial presence there.

In Australia, ".au" is the "country code". In the domain name www.ipaustralia.gov.au, the "au" is the top-level domain name, and "gov" is the second level domain name. In the domain name www.uspto.gov, ".gov" is the top-level domain name, as there is no country code (use of .gov as a TLD is restricted to United States government entities only).