Internet Addresses to be sold for $500,000

The Internet real estate is now booming with ICANN's introduction of new domain names, changing the way we connect with the World Wide Web.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California based worldwide authority on allotting domain names and website addresses now enables corporate groups and cities to create their own domain names. Just as I had reported in an earlier article, the future of Internet will now be transformed to ensure countless more websites to be created around the world. Theoretically, cities or companies may apply for an applicant specific address which can be bought from ICANN. For example, a company like Google can buy ".Google" or the city of Mumbai may register ".mumbai". However with luxury comes a price, and each one of these exclusive domains may be an estimated worth of anywhere between $100,000 to $500,000. Expected to be sold first are ".NYC for New York City and ".Berlin" for the German Capital. Apart from the domain names, except for after the dot part in the address, websites may now have addresses in as many as 15 languages. As reported at the annual ICANN meeting at Paris, the president and chief executive officer of ICANN, Paul Twomey said " We are opening up new land, which people will be able to go out and claim- like the United States in the 19th century". "It's a massive increase in the real estate of the Internet". Currently, over 71 million websites are registered under the ".com" TLD(Top Level Domain), followed by "de" for German websites. China has the fastest growing TLD ".cn" with nearly 11 million websites.