New ICANN TLDs May Cause Internet Land Rush

wiryd writes "A new ICANN proposal would allow applications for almost any TLD. From the article: 'Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop. "Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."'"

Comments

Welcome to the age

[Daimanta]

of horrible urls. How will people still be able to understand URLs if the are horribly malformed? Soon, people will not be able to distinguish between a TLD and a domain and people will fall to cleverly constructed scams.

Also, no domain is safe. Everybody can now claim google.philly or google.hiphop and companies can do nothing about it(or start countless lawsuits). This is a bad idea and implementing this will cause the www to be more confusing than it is now.

largest marketing and branding opportunities?

[arcmay]

"It could translate into one of the largest clusterfucks in history."

FTFY

Re:Can we stop it?

[damn_registrars]

Where do we sign up to have this not happen?

You must be new here. You had a chance. ICANN took comments on this last year. Apparently not enough people spoke up about the problems, because they are going forward with it anyways.