ICANN approves new Top-Level Domains for brands

ICANN’s Board of Directors has recently announced the approval of one of the biggest changes ever to the domain naming system for websites: making it possible for Internet users to create their own extensions.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved the expansion of the range of addresses available, which will allow companies and organizations to turn their own brands into Internet domain extensions or to create broad generic strings such as .CAR, .SPORTS or .BANK, according to CircleID.

Currently, there are 22 global Top-Level Domains in existence, plus about 250 country-level domains. When the changes go live, hundreds of new global TLDs are expected to come into existence.

The organization will soon begin a global campaign to tell the world about this dramatic change in Internet names. Applications for the new gTLDs will begin on January 12 next year.

Here’s an interesting Infographic from CircleID that details the shift from .com to .brand.