ICANN Authorizes Huge Changes to the Domain Name System

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers met in Mexico last week (March 1-6, 2009) to discuss changes to the Domain Name System. As the governing body for Internet addresses and domain names, the changes they discussed are very important to anyone interested in the web, especially business oriented users.

Some of the changes that will be coming down the pipe include:

• A massive expansion of generic top-level domains. These new domains such as .eco, .green, .beer, etc., could be the next gold mine for internet companies. Imagine Zappos.shoes instead of .com.
• International Domain Name. The domain name system is English based and only the roman character set is supported. ICANN plans to allow the use of Arabic characters, Chinese characters, Cyrillic, and other languages in their domains.
• Expansion of country and language specific domains. Many countries already have these, .uk, .fr, .eu, etc. The plan is to expand these into even more countries and even languages.
• Switch to IPv6. The ip address protocol system that is used to find every computer and website on the internet is running out of addresses. Companies have slowly and begrudgingly been moving their programs to the new protocol. ICANN wants this to be pushed forward faster.

All of these changes are very important to the continued growth and vitality of the internet. Lets face it, the domain name system has become very stagnant at this point. So much so, that companies make up words to call themselves just because the domain name for it is available. Expanding the amount of domain names would start a whole new wave of investment from developing countries and established businesses.

Instead of everyone vying for the few .com domains left we could have domains that accurately reflect the content. This would be a huge improvement. Lets hope these changes gets rolled out soon.