This would appear to be the start of the proliferation of gTLDs which ICANN has held back for four or five years. Now that the selection process has changed from ICANN just "choosing" the ones they want as a 'proof-of-cocept', to a criterion-referenced selection process (if you can meet thes 'x' criteria then you have the right to launch a gTLD) it seems likely that more and more companies will follow suite in the next few years and launch their own gTLDs.
Given that technically 100s of gTLDs could be supported, it then becomes a matter of which ones would survive commercially. In other words, the existence of future gTLDs is likely to be market-driven.
The end product is likely to be a more fragmented DNS and a proliferation of endings. This could have a number of knock-on effects on the domain 'market':
1. It could reduce the value of many domains because it becomes so easy to find your name if you can choose from scores of TLDs. (But then, you can already do that if you use ccTLDs.) Nevertheless I would have thought .info and .biz names, for example, might well depreciate in value whenother TLDs start to flood the market.
2. It could, paradoxically, make one or two TLDs even more in demand. When there is growing user confusion over scores of ne gTLDs it would make sense for demand to grow for a distinctive TLD like .com. So the increase of "minor" TLDs could actually strengthen .com
3. The effect of TLD proliferation and user confusion could shift things more and more towards a search-engine dependency. But that doesn't necessarily have any impact on market value of domains.
I expect to see maybe between 40 and 60 gTLDs in operation by 2010. But this could be proved wromg if the market just doesn't sustain that number. However, if such proliferation does occur, I think it *does* call into question the value and success of .info and .biz.
I still live in hope of technology expanding the use (and value) of domain names for a variety of addressing/media purposes. My making domain names into memorable alternatives for associated telephone numbers, you would have the potential for creating a system where people all over the world just had to remember their friends' names in order to phone them, rather than hundreds of anonymous number strings. I can never remember friends' telephone numbers - but I could much more easily key in memorable names. Similar use of domains could be applied to billing systems, home interactive media etc. A person's whole home system and communications could become domain (name) based, with a bit of imagination and technological progress.
Richard Henderson
