You’ve probably never head of ICANN, but you’ve seen their work: .com, .org, .net—that was them. ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the organization that brings you those nifty little endings on website names that we know so well. Recently, ICANN voted to expand its offering of top-level domains again, and this expansion could really shake things up for the internet, making it more complicated and more universal at the same time.

Originally, the internet only had a handful of these domains—.com and .org, among others—but as the web developed and grew, and more people wanted domain names, ICANN had to expand, creating suffixes like .tv. Then just a few years ago, they began opening up country suffixes like .us, .co, .de, .uk, and more to indicate that a website was housed inside a particular country and to give site owners more freedom when choosing a domain name. They even opened up US state abbreviations, like .ny, .ma, and .tx.

But recently, ICANN opened up more top-level domains to include cities, like .paris or .nyc, and they’ve opened up the possibility for brands to create their own domains, for example .apple, .mcdonalds, or .bestbuy.

Although opening up city domains is pretty cool, where this story really gets interesting is with the introduction of brand-name domains. Up till now, many brands have complained that it is too easy for individuals to buy up domain names that mimic or blatantly rip-off brand names and trademarks. As a result, brands spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars each year to protect their brand names and trademarks through domain acquisitions.

Some think that opening up top-level domains with a brand attached, would only serve to worsen the problem, but ICANN has assured companies that the introduction of brand domains brings with it stricter trademark policies and regulations. However, registering the brand name top-level domain will cost nearly $200,000, which is yet another cost that companies will need to shoulder in addition to holding onto existing .com’s and .net’s in order to protect themselves online.

But despite the problems and concerns of large corporations, this move by ICANN also opens up the web to be a more equal territory globally. For example, ICANN will now allow the introduction of non-ASCII characters in domain names. That means that non-English websites no longer have to contain English characters at all, but can reflect local and regional languages like Japanese, Arabic, Russian, and more.

Overall, the opening of more top-level domains will flood the market with many more options for websites, options that can reflect the originality or uniqueness of the organizations they represent. And in a world where the internet is touted as the last truly free space, the internet just got a little bit more user-friendly.