If you’ve not heard all the noise about TLDs, you probably aren’t a billion dollar company (that’s sarcasm). Personally, I despise the fact that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has put these up for sale out of the reach of any average small business. It costs $185,000 to apply and $25,000 per year to maintain a custom TLD. This is the first time, in my opinion, the guardians of the web bypassed democratization and freedom and simply dove in to make some quick bucks.
By the end of this year, as many as 1,000 new domain extensions could be introduced to mainstream internet. If you do the math, that’s over $200 million for ICANN to add some entries in a database. Not bad. This infographic from Demandforce examines the rush for top-level domain names and what this could mean for the future of the internet.
