More than 250 million domain names were registered worldwide by the end of 2012. That's just a bit less than one for every man, woman and child alive in the United States today. Apparently, that's not enough. For better or worse (and probably some of both), by the end of 2013, the number of potential new domain names is planned to increase, perhaps dramatically. No one knows for sure how great the increase will be or what impact it will have, but it will create opportunities for online pirates. Fortunately, protection mechanisms are available.
Within the next year, the number of available generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, like .com and .net will expand. ICANN, the international body charged with organizing the domain name structure of the Internet, received more than 1,900 applications for new gTLD strings, potentially increasing the number of gTLDs hundreds of times over. ICANN has already preliminarily approved gTLD strings such as .play, .party, .energy, .food, .career, .camera, .fishing, .buy, .active, .tech and .investments. At the annual meeting of the international trademark community this past April, it was announced that ICANN expects to delegate as many as 20 new gTLDs each month to start, eventually reaching approximately 100 new gTLDs per month in the future.
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