Twenty-five years after the creation of .com, the ABCs of the Internet are about to change. On June 20, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit corporation that oversees the domain name system, approved an unprecedented expansion of generic top level domains (gTLDs).
The number of gTLDs — denoted by letters to the right of the last “dot” in a domain name — presently stands at 22. Familiar gTLDs include .com, .biz, .org, .net and .edu. In addition, there are over 250 country code top level domains (e.g. .fr, .nz). A business that wants to register a domain name corresponding to its trademark has limited options under the current system. For instance, it can choose to register its trademark within the .com gTLD, as trademark.com. In the future, under ICANN’s new gTLD program, a business or organization (individuals are not eligible) will be able to put virtually any word to the right of the “dot” by owning a gTLD. A business that registers .trademark will open up the second level domain — the letters to the left of the “dot” —to a variety of new uses that it can control, if it chooses.
