ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers, has approved generic Top level Domains, or gTLDs! (Visit the page at www.icann.org .)

What does that mean? 

Think beyond boring .com, .net, org, to .apple or .travel, or .vacationrentals, or .loans, or .wine!

These domains will not be cheap.  Applicants for gTLDs need to pay a $185,000 application fee, and $25,000/yr to keep their gTLD's.  Applications are being accepted from Jan. 12 - April 12, 2012.

That's alot more cash than the $12/yr I pay for a domain.  Why would a company buy these? Let's guess.

1) To keep their competitors from buying them.  Ford Motors will have to buy .FORD and .FORDMOTORS - or someone else will, happily... and then sell the name back to FORD when FORD wakes up.

2) To sell better on the web. What if you succeed in buying .loans?  You could create a site called housing.loans, and car.loans.  Not only would you have  great success on search engines, but your competitiors would not have a chance. 

Looking beyond these 2 changes in the search engine landscape caused by gTLD's, let's think about Google.  Will people who want to rent a condo in Aspen go to Google when they can type in condo.aspenrentals and go directly to a new portal all about vacationing in Aspen? 

And what about all us poor joes who design our own websites,  and buy cheap domains on Godaddy.  I doubt this will help us.  gTLDs will create big  web cyberbullies.