In the wider world of domain names, the address is key

Dot-restaurant will debut next month, following on the heels of dot-city, dot-organic, dot-rich, and even - dare we say it? - dot-WTF. So before you suddenly notice how the digital landscape has shifted and utter that bemused (and unprintable) expression yourself, here's an update on what's happening.

Yes, there's an Internet land rush underway, pretty much as predicted when the Net's overseers decided three years ago to allow a huge expansion of "generic top-level domains."

The result? Websites are no longer limited to addresses that end in a handful of familiar suffixes with their historic U.S.-centric tilt - or even to standard English characters. The Web is finally trying to live up to its initial, rarely used World Wide moniker.

The old system made sense in its early years. In the United States, for example, you could always identify a business by its ".com" ending, a nonprofit by its ".org," or a university by its ".edu." From our standpoint, it also seemed logical to use two-letter country domains to identify foreign sites, such as ".au" for Australia or ".cn" for China.

Commerce certainly thrived under that system. In less than a decade, "dot-com" became a synonym for any Web-based business, and shorthand for an entire industry through its first cycle of boom and bust. But the Net also became crowded, according to the coalition of stakeholders known as the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

So in 2011, ICANN decided - over some vocal dissent - to open the floodgates.

"We all grew up with dot-com and dot-org," says Roland LaPlante, senior vice president of Afilias Ltd., an Irish company with U.S. headquarters in Horsham that serves as one of the Internet's leading domain-name registries. "Now there are 110 million names registered as dot-coms, and it's really hard to get one. And it's not very descriptive."

The emerging system is harder to describe than the old one. But with help from LaPlante and from a competitor, Jon Nevett, a cofounder and executive vice president of Donuts.co, I'll take a shot.

Donuts is a good place to start. Founded in 2010, Donuts itself uses a ".co" suffix - originally the country domain for Colombia, which the Bellevue, Wash., company has nothing to do with. Dot-co has essentially been rebranded for business use.

About 400 of the new generic top-level domains (TLDs) have begun operating, and a thousand more are on the way. Donuts alone proposed 307 new TLDs, more than three times as many as second-place Google, Nevett said.

Some come with obvious, built-in appeal.

It's not surprising, for instance, that dot-music is up for grabs among eight applicants, and likely headed for auction. Among Donuts' other new domains are dot-dating, dot-clothing, dot-rentals, and, as of Wednesday, dot-healthcare. Dot-pizza, dot-network, and dot-business will launch by year's end.

Other new domains are more narrowly targeted - or hardly "generic" at all. Comcast Corp. has applied for a dot-Comcast domain, and others in its hometown are looking enviously at New York City's new dot-NYC address. Sadly, dot-Philly is probably a few years away - it wasn't proposed in this initial expansion, though Berlin; Istanbul, Turkey; Tokyo; and London made the cut.

LaPlante says big companies have obvious reasons to want their own TLDs: "Five years from now, I doubt anyone will be looking for Comcast services at a dot-com address."

Afilias has big hopes for some of its new TLDs, such as dot-organic, which LaPlante calls "a protected space for the organic community on the Internet." To qualify, a company has to show how it's certified as organic. Afilias already has recruited companies such as Stonyfield, the yogurt maker, and Rodale Inc., the Emmaus, Pa., "healthy lifestyle company," to pioneer the new turf. Other new Afilias entries, such as dot-red, dot-blue, and dot-pink, seem more speculative.

And what about Donuts' dot-WTF? You be the judge. One of its pioneers is Math.wtf, which calls itself a site for "math games, lessons and funny memes," and says wtf means "we teach funny."

1,930

New top-level domain (TLD) proposals.

417

New TLDs already available online.

911

New-domain applications from North America.

116

TLDs proposed in other scripts, such as Cyrllic or Arabic.

12

Number of such scripts represented in proposals. EndText

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