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First New Generic Top Level Domains Opening
umdenken points out that the first batch of generic Top Level Domains will go live within the next several days, including .bike, .guru, .clothing, .holdings, .singles, .plumbing, and .ventures. (Early access began Jan. 29th.) ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade says there is currently huge demand for ICANN to reopen their program to let companies run their own gTLD. He said, "Many, many brands and many, many communities didn't know about the GTLD program. I get significant amounts of questions about when can we open the next round, because certainly there is a bit of angst that if Canon [who applied for the .canon gTLD] uses this to do an incredible mass customization campaign to win users to their product, I'm sure the brand next to them will say "Why aren't we doing this?" So I do believe this will snowball. But many will find a .com or whatever they have now will be good enough, and I believe that one excludes the other." He also said the $185,000 price tag to do so is likely to drop.
The root of the DNS zone is still handled by the US government. ICANN has a consultative role and suggests modifications, US can still veto any suggestion and can nuke a whole country out of DNS if they so chose.
"Inventing the Internet" gives you the same rights over the international Internet as "inventing the English language" gives over English speakers. If not for the DoD project, the computers of the world would have been connected using a descendant of Minitel, BBSes etc. It would have been completely different at the protocol level and completely similar at it's uses and porn availability.
Now you can make your domain name look like a USENET discussion forum:
alt.fashion.goth.clothing
comp.languages.cobol.programmer.guru
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads