OK, the long awaited .anything domains received the green light from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) during their meeting on 20th June 2011. Yes we knew it will be pricey we new it will be available only for corporates and we knew main force behind it is anti-cybersquatting corporate team with HP and Morgan Stanley behind it.
So what about dates and prices? The initial go ahead is for applications from Trademark and Corporate Brands and it will take place between Jan 2012 and Apr 2012. Application cost is $185,000 USD (peanuts) and the first “one word/letter” domain is scheduled to go live by the end of 2012. Yes this is another spin off .anything. The “.” will go (wow!) – sooner or later this same way people no longer use “http” and “www”. This is actually more significant from “.anything” itself because it will have direct impact on our way of searching for data on the web. Marketing will change too.
Google and other search engines may need to decide which domain is more important old stuff like “ibiza.com” which belongs to cybersquatters like fma or simply “ibiza”. This way or another there is a chance if we are lucky we will have domains which simply will be our names with IPv6 assigned to us when we ware born – kind of global passport (What about this idea 
Dot anything looks incredibly chaotic at this moment but we are sure we will learn how to use it soon. After few years of strict overlooking from ICANN some rules will be relaxed and some more strict than today when registering a web address.
Try to imagine now you type in word car in to browser and you are served with result page of your preferred search engine (browsers introduced “one box” recently). In the future word “car” can be actually website would this mean back to separate search box in 2013?
Find out more on ICAAN website about who is involved and how .anything will work: ICANN.ORG
