According to Ad Age, big brands may start to compete for vanity domain extensions. For instance, Pepsi and Coca-Cola might vie for .soda or .pop; Procter & Gamble and Unilever could vie for .laundry or .soap; and McDonald’s and Wendy’s could bid on .burger or .fries.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit agency that oversees the distribution and policy of domain names, would conduct an auction, and the domain rights would go to the highest bidder. And that could get pricey quickly for brand owners. One outside consultant estimated that the total cost to business could reach $1.5 billion.
Today there are currently 21 generic top-level domains–.com, .net and .org currently account for 91% of all top-level-domain registrations; .com alone accounts for 74%.
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If a bidding war breaks out over these new top level domains, it would only be to prove that one company can out spend the other, since they don’t work very well. For proof, just look at Delicious. They had probably the only odd TLD that was working with del.icio.us, and even they changed back to just plain old delicious.com.
Sure, it might be cute to have best.burger, but is that any easier to remember than bestburger.com? I don’t think so.