Earlier this year the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the outfit in charge of addresses in cyberspace, allowed applications for new suffixes. That would allow new domains, such as .microsoft, .paris and .music, to join the 22 existing handles, such as .com and .info. Brand owners complain they will have to spend millions buying domains they don’t want, just to protect their online identities. In early April it halted applications for new domains after discovering a technical glitch that may have allowed some applicants to view each other’s confidential plans. The system was rebooted on May 22nd and the applications will probably be made public in mid-June. Lawsuits loom about that. No one will challenge Disney for .disney, but what about .disneyexperience? Such questions remains unclear despite more than 300 pages of guidelines. The battles will be fiercest over the most popular generic suffixes—such as .art, .radio, .music and .web.
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