The Internet is getting crowded… with opportunities!

Until now, the largest expansion of top domain names occurred in 2001. That was a small endeavor: .biz, .info, .aero, etc. None of them became hugely popular. The current expansion will include about 1,900 new Web names. Over the next few months, users will be able to visit sites at .luxury, .gay, .mom and .bible, to name just a few.

Ask Brad White why this is happening — Is the Internet too crowded ? — and he chuckles. “The premise of that question is that need dictates innovation,” says White, the director of global media relations for ICANN, which was founded in 1998 in response to a proposal by the federal government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. But need, White says, doesn’t dictate innovation. “No one demanded Facebook” before Mark Zuckerberg introduced it. “No one demanded Twitter.” Sometimes the technology is invented, and then users figure out what it’s good for.

From a business side, one sees why this is a big deal: competing interests scrabbling to stake out more space in the virtual world. But culturally, it also reflects the fact that the Internet is still relatively new — the equivalent of the party-line era of the telephone. What we have now doesn’t begin to look like what we’ll have in even 10 years. ICANN is in the final stages of application evaluations. New sites could appear as early as late September. “People,” says White, “are going to sit down at their browsers and see a whole new world.”…

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Comments are closed.