Well the big news is out! ICANN has revealed the long list of new gTLDs. It’s amazing how many people have a spare $185,000 knocking around.

I’m glad to see there’s a .wtf and a .beer, intrigued to see multiple applications for .web, and curious to see who will win the race for .sex and .shop. All the expected entries are there from the usual suspects such as .google, .youtube, .aol etc. It’s also good to see a long list of non-latin domains following last year’s upgrade of DNS to support broader languages – although being a sad unilinguist, I have no idea what any of them mean.

Forbes ran an interesting article on the disquiet brewing over the continuing power of the US over this essentially global system. They suggest the contention around gTLDs such as .muslim could force the issue that ICANN should answer to the UN not the US government. I doubt the US is going to give up control of this aspect of the Internet any time soon.

And perhaps this is a good thing. Would the UN have approved a corner of the Internet solely dedicated to unrelated WTFs?