ICANN Will Allow Companies to Be the Master of Their Own Domain

ICANN, the non-profit body that’s responsible for overseeing top level domains like .com, .net and .org, held a vote today that will allow companies to register their very own top level domains. {CircleID} That means you could visit Apple at a .mac website, or Louis Vuitton at .lvmh, and companies could have an additional level of online branding and security.

If you’re thinking “that sounds pretty cool,” we agree, but the fees to get in on the action mean that larger companies are likely to be the only ones at this domain party. It will cost $185,000 per TLD just to apply, and an additional $75,000 each year for approved domains for maintenance. In other words, go ahead and bookmark us at the .com, we’re going to need some time and money to shift over to .signature9.

That also doesn’t include a $0.25 per domain fee, but that’s only if you have more than 50,000 registered secondary domains.

Still, even with the high fees, ICANN anticipates 300-1,000 applications, and honestly we think that’s on the low end. While your ordinary domain squatter might not be able to afford the fee, we’re sure there are plenty of under the radar domain buyers just waiting to scoop up generic endings like .car or .inc, and that’s not even touching on regional top level domain possibilities like .nyc. We’re sure .ing could spawn plenty of creative domains (buy.ing, shopp.ing, listen.ing…), and there are probably 10 more TLDs that we haven’t thought of.

In addition to the potential boon for businesses, we’re sure domain registrars are chomping at the bit to begin filing applications. Imagine GoDaddy being the only registrar with .go domains or a smaller registrar gaining exclusivity over a good generic TLD and you have a good idea of the potential of this new change.