dingostew.com

The governing body behind online domains will allow cities, organisations and companies to register their own top-level domains, such as .Coke or .London in one of the biggest shake-ups in web address history.

The Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers voted in favour of the proposal to allow unlimited new top-level domains at a special meeting in Singapore.

There are 22 top-level domains currently in use, including .com and .org and about 250 country-level domains such as .au and .uk.

It will cost $185,000 to register a new top level domain and the application process will be designed to prioritise those who have the most legitimate claim to the name.

The cost and process involved in registering a new top-level domain is expected to help global corporations to weed out so-called cybersquatters, who profit from popular brands by registering similar web addresses.

However, it is anticipated conflict could arise over some names, particularly where a brand is also a commonly used noun, such as "apple".

Search engines are expected to react to the move with new, simpler ways to find websites but there is some controversy over whether it could actually complicate search results by adding another level of address detail.

ICANN is anticipating 300 to 1000 new top-level domains under the new program, with applications expected to open in early 2012.

Got a spare $175,000? You can register dingostew.eoinzy .

Also i wonder how much *.*.xxx or *.*.sex will go for.

jesus yeah! Thats crazy money! The price of a .com is around $6 per year. I think nearly 200k is a bit pricey, even if it guarantees that you wont be cybersquatted.

I'd imagine the accounts dept in coke, or the London council will be looking at the 2 yearly prices side by side and wondering why the f**k they would pay that much for exactly the same thing. Sure 99% of people will still type in [company_name].com first!!

Also, there's a TV station over here called UTV. Their website is u.tv ! They musta paid about 30c for that!!

I think the $175,000 is once off ownership stake to make it only available to corporates. After that renewal is as per usual.

It is only a matter of time until we are entering au.com.coke instead of coke.com.au.

well it'd be more like people just typing in "coke", coz the "au" sub-domain can be redirected to based on location. Also, the "com" part is replaced by "coke" so isnt needed so in the case of coke.com, it'd just be "coke". :p

Funnily enough, if u open ur browser and type in "coke" it will either bring u to a search engine with coke.com as the first link, or it'll bring you to the coke website itself anyway, sotheres no difference really!!

In saying that though, thats some money making scheme by ICANN!!

The XXX one is not for sale as far as I know.
The American business people have tried (successfully) so far in their lobbing of the Net governing body, not to let it come on line and have sex/explicit site be restricted to that domain.
They fear loss of revenue for a number of reasons.

They're worried about losing revenue if porn sites ARE moved to .xxx? I suppose it'd be handy to have it all in one place, although then my excuse of "I thought it was an arts website" will be gone out the window!!