Source from PC WORLD

ICANN has been talking about adding hundreds of new TLDs since its inception in 1998. Since then, ICANN has twice opened up the Internet landscape to new domains. In 2000, ICANN added seven extensions including .info and .biz, and in 2004 ICANN added six more extensions including .asia and .jobs.None of the new extensions has been wildly successful.


Today, the Internet has 21 generic top-level domains and another 250 country-code top-level domains. Yet almost half of the 196.3 million registered domain names across all top-level domains are in .com, the original designation for companies doing business on the Internet.

"Only .info, .biz and .mobi ever got above a million names of the 15 new TLDs," LaPlante admits. "But registrations aren't the only measure of success. The Catalan community is thrilled with .cat, which has 20,000 or 30,000 names. They are very proud of their success. Other TLDs seem to have lost their way, like .pro, which had a pretty cool business plan and a pretty cool vision but never caught on."

Whether or not the latest round of new TLDs will be successful remains to be seen.

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