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Widely reported by now, some different opinions expressed. On its Paris meeting this week, ICANN has announced that it is considering to allow individuals and companies to create their own top-level domains.

Lots of companies, organizations and cities have applied for their own extensions in the past years, including Berlin (.berlin) and New York City (.nyc). Not one of these TLDs has been accepted yet, but ICANN might be changing its mind very soon.

If the ICANN board votes in favor of an open domain system, we will see hundreds if not thousands of new TLDs being created. Especially corporate users will love having their company name as a domain extension.

For example, eBay could use .eBay to promote its various auction categories: Movies.eBay, Coins.eBay, Sports.eBay, Cameras.eBay and so on. It would also be possible to create generic TLDs like .auto and .money. These gTLDs would probably be highly coveted… who knows whether ICANN is be going to auction these off to the highest bidders in order to raise even more cash. Another possibility is the creation of geographic extensions, as mentioned above. The cities could then make money by selling domains to end users or by creating business directories: Lawyers.NYC, Doctor.NYC, CarDealer.NYC, Money.NYC, Stocks.NYC, News.NYC, etc.

You see, there will be lots of opportunities if ICANN decides to give this a green light in the end. But what would this mean for today’s domain industry? First of all, registrants who are going to register a domain under .com that isn’t available anymore will decide to switch to another TLD and they might then choose one those that have been newly created. It is likely that they will have plenty of possibilities to choose from, because I expect a run for generic and geographic top-level domains. This means there will be more substitutes for .com.

Now, I’m not sure what to think of this myself. It could be that new TLDs will strengthen DotCom, as has been the case in the past, but an open domain system could also increase people’s awareness of other TLDs and therefore cause quite the contrary: a decrease in demand for .com domains.

On the other hand, it is also very well possible that traffic to .com domains will go up, when people looking for Cars.NewExtension, for instance, type in Cars.com. Another possibility would be that people will respond negatively to an overwhelmingly large number of TLDs and opt for good old .com, which in turn would have a positive influence on the value of DotCom domains again.

Well, nothing has been decided, yet, so speculating won’t help. But it has been reported that ICANN is going to make a decision this year, which means that we could have an open TLD system as early as 2009. I have read that the price for your own TLD is expected to be in the range between €25,000 and €250,000, so it would be mostly companies and well-funded individuals getting their own extensions. But by acting as a registry and selling domains under their TLDs to others, all this could result in hundreds of thousands of additional domain names being registered within the next few years. Where this will leave us remains to be seen.