ICANN Opens Domain Naming Process to the General Public

On Monday, June 20, 2011, the Internet's governing body approved a plan to greatly expand the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs), opening up the naming process to the general public through a newly developed application system. Generic TLDs are the Internet extension found to the right of the last dot in a web address, such as .com, .gov., or .edu. After more than five years of debate, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), agreed on Monday to a plan that will allow public or private organizations to create and apply for any domain name they choose. Currently, the vast majority of web addresses retain the familiar .com as their gTLD. ICANN's new proposal could change all this, making .com domain names a thing of the past for large companies.