A new wave of domain extensions will be hitting the market in the years to come.  ICANN approved the sale and listing of new “vTLD’s”, as coined by David Castello for “Vanity Top Level Domains”.

The initial expectation for the market is the creation of geo TLD’s, such as .paris, .chicago, .nyc, etc.  Expense is a bit of an issue, as it costs well above $100k to register and maintain such a TLD.  So, after that, larger corporations (profit and non-profit) are expected to get involved with .ibm, .nike, .microsoft, .church, .hostpital, etc. 

From there, it will take coordination within industries to create new TLD’s.  I would next expect to see the likes of a .hotel, .energy, .finance, .sports, and .shopping (or something of the retail commerce industry).

And lastly, do not forget the foreign language TLD’s.  Extensions in non-latin characters have been approved, so expect to see IDN’s with IDN TLD’s, such as 東京.日本 (Tokyo.Japan in Japanese) very soon.  The big question in this space is whether countries will map currently owned domains in their country extensions to the new TLD.  For instance, we own シアトル.jp (Seattle.jp).  Does that get mapped to  シアトル.日本, the new TLD for that domain?  Korean Internet firms have already been planning on this happening, as discussed by the Korea Times in, “New Internet Domains Excite Firms“.

While all of these TLD’s will have the chance to proliferate, ICANN and the domain system is merely clarifying two things for the english language Internet by creating this excess real estate.

1. The TLD “.com” is the main English language domain and will only grow from this increase in supply to the market.  Anyone looking for the primary target of their search will go to the .com first, even if listed among choices within search results.  It is human nature, at least for now…time will tell how long that lasts.
2. Content is king.  As search moves more towards the semantic web, or web 3.0, generic domains will slowly lose value if they do not have content.  People will slowly begin to access that content through multiple paths, not just your domain.  If you own the domain, you own the content, but without it your domain loses value.  Kevin Kelly explains the future of accessing information quite well, in “The Four Stages of Internet Things“.

Both of these forces are attacking parked .com’s.  Their years are numbered.  Prepare yourself.