Personalized Top-Level Domains Coming Up
At its meeting in Paris, ICANN, a not-for-profit organization that oversees the naming scheme for Web sites, voted to accept a proposal that will allow companies to purchase new top-level domain names ending in whatever they like.
So, for example, instead of being restricted to sites ending in .com or .org., eBay could have a site that ends in .ebay, or New York City could end its Web site with .nyc.
The new naming process will begin in 2009. The first suffixes will likely be given to businesses and other major organizations. Countries are expected to keep their specific suffixes, but as in the example above cities could also get individualized URLs, such as .london or .chicago.
However, this isn’t going to come easy - expect the new domain names to cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 or more. [Via]
Would this have any impact on SEO? - for instance, a company could register a TLD, and then create a new URL for each of the pages, etc. etc. Wonder how it would work - once a company books a TLD, would it then be allowed to create as many URLs as it wants, or would it have to pay the amount for each any every URL?
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