The End of The .Com Era

By Everett Rosenfeld Monday, July 04, 2011

    • Web suffixes like com and edu may become less common in the next few years. On June 20, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it will relax the standards by which websites may be named. As of next July, top-level domain suffixes will no longer be confined to 22 three-letter options; they will be able to stretch up to 63 characters long. It will cost $185,000 to apply for a new suffix, leading critics to accuse ICANN of corporatizing the future of the Internet. Companies, including Canon, have already announced that they will apply for custom suffixes.