As expected, the international body that oversees internet domain names has voted to change the way top-level domains work. Right now there are only about 200 top level domains, with some of the most widespread being .com, .net, .org, and .edu. But under the rules adopted by ICANN today, companies or individuals will be able to register top line domains using pretty much any string of characters.For example, why settle for www.downloadquad.com when you could have www.download.squad? The advantage to the new system is that it will be much easier to snag the domain you really want. The down side is that most web surfers tend to think in .com. It's already hard enough to remember whether you need to type in .com, .net, or .org. It could be much harder to find the page you're looking for if there are literally millions of options.
Of course, it's not like just anybody is going to go out and register a new top-level domain. The application fee will be upwards of $100,000. And even if we do wind up with 2000 or even 2,000,000 top-level domains instead of 200, odds are it'll still be easy enough to find the sites you're looking for thanks to these nifty things called search engines.
ICANN has also approved the use of Arabic and Cyrillic scripts for top-level domains.
