The Future Of Internet After Implication Of Icann's New Tld Rules

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About two weeks ago, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced that starting from 2012, the normal domain name rules will end. The current 22 approved extensions (.com, .net, .biz etc apart from the specific extensions for each country) will not be the only extension for TLD (top level domains). After 2011, companies would be able to register names such as .google, .nytimes etc. In this way, a whole new (potentially unlimited) array of domain names would be available to buy.So what can be the implications of this announcement on internet? First of all, let me explain that what would be the difference in current TLDs and the New TLDs. Currently, when someone wants to go to google, he has to type "https://www.google.de/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=BwkjVKfAD8uH8QfckIGgCQ&gws_rd=ssl;. This is because, every domain name should have a proper ending extension (one of the approved 22 extensions). So every name ends in .com, or .net, or .biz, or etc etc. But after the implication of the new rules, to go to google, you will have to just type "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; or simply "google". So imagine how much difference it would make for generic terms like .seo or .cars etc.To avoid the gold rush (as occurred about a decade ago) the ICANN has kept the price tag out of the reach of most people. To secure such costom TLD you will have to pay $200,000 and then you $25,000 as monthly maintenance fee. This makes these domains out of the reach of common business owners but the big brands can easily afford it and can abuse it too.The main point I want to make in this post is that what is going to be the future of internet after this change happens. Yes, the change is not going to happen any soon, but sooner or later, it will dominate the internet and some changes will happen. Can today's internet, which is dominated by search, be changed completely with these Custom TLDs? What will happen to search engines once the changes occurr? What would be the future of SEO?The above are questions that are in the minds of lots of people and everyone has a different explanation for them. I would like to share how I see these changes would effect the future.In my opinion, these changes coupe the biggest challenge to search engines. Today, without the search engines, the internet is just useless for many. Everyone is so dependent on them that some people consider search as internet. A normal internet user perform a search on the internet about 30 times a day and don't even notice that he has done something. The importance can be estimated by the fact that today's browsers are designed in such a way that they make search very easy. For instance, if you have firefox, and you write a couple of words in the url bar, instead of telling you that you have entered an incomplete URL address, the firefox takes you the the search results page of your default search engine.But when these changes occur, the search share will drop tremendously. Today when you type "cars" in the url bar, you go the the search result page for the term car and millions of users do this for this single term each month. But after someone acquires the ".cars" domain, instead of going to the search page, the user will go the website "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;. So the search engines will lose about a million searches only for one word. Imagine this for thousands of other generic high traffic words.In my opinion the search engines will really have to work hard in the future to stay in the business.