Jeff Jarvis notes that a veritable blizzard of domain names could be coming our way:

Identity just got more complicated. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine — from .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, etc. to .anything. So there will be an explosion in what we nerdily called the internet namespace. On the one hand, this means we don’t have to all fight and scrape to grab any brand followed by a .com. But it also means there’ll be a land rush to create and sell every possible combination of words — amazon.store, amazon.book, amazon.everything (and Amazon will be faced with having to buy them all to protect its brand).

In the end, I suspect this kind of thing will make two groups happy (Google and scammers), and lots of other people very unhappy (anyone who owns an existing domain that could be squatted on). Sure, it opens up names in a good way, too - instead of names like flickr, actual vowels could come back. On the other hand, without a search engine, how would find any of them?

One thing's certain: if this happens, you'll definitely have to go out and buy .YourCompanyNameHere.

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