For quite some time, the though has been that the Internet was running out of domain names.  While finding a good domain name is harder than ever, it looks like that situation is about to change.  ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the domain registrar of the world and the company that essentially runs the skeleton of the Internet, has decided to make things easier.  ICANN has opened up bidding on a whole raft of personalized top-level domain names.  You know .com?  That’s a top-level domain.  Soon you may be hitting up google. google for your search news.  Or maybe google.search, if companies get their way.

“The Internet is about to change forever,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom declared.  ”We’re standing at the cusp of a new era of online innovation, innovation that means new businesses, new marketing tools, new jobs, new ways to link communities and share information.”

We’ve heard all this before.  For all the hype about .info, .tv, .biz, and all the other available top level domain additions made in recent years, if you’re not a .com or at least a .net, then you’re not exactly taken seriously.  Granted, if I was Google, I’d pay millions for a .google top-level domain and the right to administer it as I saw fit, if only to keep it for myself.

Of course, that costs money.  Serious money.  Interested top-level domain bidders are paying $185,000 per application, and that’s before they’re granted the rights to the domains they seek.  There’s also a 10-year commitment per domain, with each domain needing a staggering $25,000 per year to maintain.  Google applied for 101 different domains, including .app, .music, .love, and who knows what else; meanwhile, Apple applied for one top-level domain, .apple.