In the 1990s, it was important to restrict the variety of top level domains to develop familiarity with internet naming conventions, so that people who saw “example.com” would recognise it as being an internet name.
But now that internet use has spread, further TLDs can be added to provide more identifiers for the wider use while keeping internet names recognisable.
The earliest expansion of the TLDs (after the original set of just .com, .edu, .gov, .mil and .org) was to add country code TLDs, such as .au for Australia and .cn for China.
That helped align the international nature of internet names with existing naming systems (in particular, trademarks) that operate nationally.
However, many organisations or people still could not obtain the name(s) that they sought, usually because someone else in a different industry had got in first.
Registries would also like to open more top-level domains so that names can suggest the category of the site, such as .biz and .xxx.
There has also been increasing need to internationalise domain names by supporting non-Latin characters.
This is implemented by using a system called “Punycode” to translate symbols from the internationalised Unicode character set to the Latin-based ASCII characters that are used in the domain name system, similar to the way in which names are translated into numeric addresses.
In 2008, ICANN started soliciting applications for new TLDs, and revealed almost 2000 such applications in June 2012.
New TLD applications include .melbourne, .sydney, .auspost and .woodside from Australia, and more generic .app, .shop, and .movie domains.
Organisations paid ICANN US$185,000 to apply for each TLD and will pay US$25,000 per annum to maintain rights to use the TLD. Approved applicants are expected to be able to start using the TLDs as early as April 23.
The first batch of 30 application results all demonstrate the use internationalised character sets, such as the “.??” TLD meaning “.store” in Chinese, and additional application review results will be announced in batches until August.
Even if you have the cash and the motivation to get your own TLD, don’t hold your breath. The next application window has not yet been set, and the one previous to this latest round happened in 2004.
With such growth and internationalisation of the internet naming system, 2013 is sure to be an exciting – if expensive – year.
Tim Moors is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at the University of New South Wales. This article first appeared on 
The Conversation.
