PCMag.Com - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) plan to let almost anything be a Top Level Domain (TLD) is about to take the Web back to its Wild West roots. And only those who remember history know what to expect.Way back in the early days of the Web, I remember the domain name gold rush. It was just like the Gold Rush of 1848, with domain name prospectors racing across a virtual country of possible top-level domain names (TLDs) to try and find the gold hidden among them. What constituted domain gold? Anything that anyone else might want—really, really badly.
Brand names were at a premium. So were simple names. CNET's founder Halsey Minor shrewdly snapped up "TV", "News", "Download" and more. Any domain that described a thing was of high value and any brand name that was a domain was soon contested. You see, in the early days of the World Wide Web, no one thought about how it should really be the intellectual property (IP) owner who registers the matching domains. For example, McDonalds.com was not, initially, owned by the restaurant chain. "Whitehouse.com," is still not owned by the White House. Bill Clinton did not own "WilliamJClinton" and Nike didn't own "JustDoIt.net." This wasn't really surprising, considering how slowly old-world brands (and people) moved online. Some weren't even sure there was value in putting their brands on the Web. No one in 1996 foresaw that the little online bookstore Amazon.com would turn into the global online retail giant it is today.
These legal battles cost companies and celebrities millions and made squatters an equal amount of money. Eventually, most major brands found a way to get their domains. Now, ICANN threatens to start the whole thing over again. They just introduced rules that will add an almost unlimited number of top level domains (these are the .coms, .orgs and .nets of the world). There are currently 22. When ICANN is finished, there could be millions. More
