Just what we didn't ask for for Christmas

Erin Mershon has a Politico article about new URLs:

The Internet is about to get its first taste of the .anything future.
After eight years of debate, numerous delays and countless quarrels, an effort to expand the Web’s address system beyond the familiar .com and .net to more than a thousand new endings is reaching its conclusion. By the end of January 2014, companies can start selling website names on the first batch of approved new suffixes such as .clothing, .singles, and .plumbing.
Proponents and critics of the program agree it’s now at a sink-or-swim moment. Its success depends in large part on whether the domain-name industry— the companies managing many of the new endings— can persuade businesses and consumers to use them.
The rollout also represents a key test for ICANN, the nonprofit group overseeing the expansion. ICANN said the program would spark a new wave of online innovation, approving it over the objections of advertisers who warned it would be costly for businesses and confusing for Web users.
“Owners have to get the word out to consumers that there is a new destination to go to,” said Nao Matsukata, CEO of the domain consulting firm FairWinds Partners. “It’s about old-fashioned advertising: how do you educate and inform the user that these sites are there.”
ICANN began accepting applications for the new suffixes— officially known as generic top-level domains, or gTLDs— in early 2012, and a slew of companies plunked down the $185,000 fee to throw their hat in the ring.
The program attracted an array of domain companies as well as well as larger firms seeking the right to operate their own brand names as an ending— for example, .cadillac or .mcdonalds. Tech giants like Google and Amazon.com also spent millions on an array of applications for terms such as .app and .search.
As the expansion process moves forward, the domain industry is pushing to raise awareness of the new options. The largest domain-name seller, GoDaddy, is notifying its existing customers of the new endings that will soon be available. Once they are, the company plans to ramp up its advertising efforts even further, said Mike McLaughlin, GoDaddy’s vice president of domains.
Another domain-name seller, 1and1.com, launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign this fall aimed at explaining the arrival of new gTLDs. Some companies are offering preregistrations for website names on the new endings.
There are about twenty existing suffixes, dominated by the popular .com. Most consumers are familiar with a handful of other endings like .net, .gov, and .edu. Polls, however, show a vast majority of Internet users do not know about the coming expansion.
That’s fueling the public-relations push by industry. One 2013 survey sponsored by domain industry consultants found that with minimal education about the program, a majority of Internet users would feel comfortable with websites and email addresses that use the new names.
Proponents of the program, many of whom invested in the new gTLDs, say the current namespace is overcrowded, with a hundred million websites ending with .com. Nearly every combination of letters on that ending has been purchased, they say, meaning established companies either have to pay a great deal to buy the rights to a website name, or use an overly long address instead.
“For a lot of businesses, we’ve just simply run out of available names,” said Cyrus Namazi, vice president for industry engagement at ICANN. “You won’t find the name you want in a .com or .net. You have to hyphenate something or change your string.”
But others argue the program will mainly create a host of new jobs for lawyers and domain investors, without adding much value to the Internet. Consumers aren’t clamoring for the new names, they say, since most people use search engines— or increasingly, smartphone apps— to find websites.
“Half the time consumers type Facebook into their search bar anyway,” said Esther Dyson, a former ICANN chairman who opposed the expansion. “I don’t think it’s adding a huge amount of value. Adding these strings is likely just to get confusing.” Dyson sees much more value in a less glitzier aspect of the expansion— the addition of internationalized domain names. Launching alongside endings like .tattoo or .fly will be names that use non-English alphabets or character sets, in Cyrillic, Arabic, or Chinese. Google’s first domain name, for example, will be the Japanese word for “everyone”.
“You go to other parts of the world, and right now, even if people type their second-level domain name in an alphabet they use, they still have to end it with a .com,” Namazi said.
Most observers agree it is brand names like .nike— rather than generic terms like .fitness— that have a better shot at widespread adoption, since they can leverage consumer trust and familiarity.
Even the most aggressive applicants say they aren’t aiming to knock .com off its perch, at least right away.
“Even though the Internet is only about twenty years old, our minds have been programmed, for all practical purposes, to end our urls with a .com,” Namazi said. “And for that mindset to change, it’s going to take some time.”

Rico says it's just what we needed: a thousand different suffixes... (But if it lets Rico get around the screwing that Network Solutions is trying to give him over zoneoffire.com, he's all for it, thus he signed on, via GoDaddy, for zoneoffire.movie when it's available.)