REVIEW >> ICANN Approves a Free-For-All in Domain Names

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that approves Web domains, has given a thumbs up on a new domain-naming system that enables anything to be accepted, and we mean everything like “www.face.book,” “www.green.eco,” or “computer.programming.”

You can sense that this new rule would be a field day for cyber squatters and phishers, but ICANN took care of that… in a way. Instead of the traditional $6.95 annual registration fee, coming up with such non-traditional domains would cost them an application fee of $185,000 plus a yearly $25,000 fee to maintain the domain.

The first batch of these “anything goes” domains are expected to go online within a year.

Source: New York Times and AFP, via Engadget