The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as ICANN, voted at a meeting in Paris that it will allow custom internet domain suffixes. What this means is that if until now a company or organization could have chosen only from suffixes that would suggest its location (.de or .fr) or its type of business (.com for commercial, .org for organization), in the future it will be able to opt for a domain name that could represent the type of market that the company would operate on.

This means that new sites under the top-level domain names like .tokyo or .movies will appear. Cool as it may sound, a lot of experts in the industry have rushed to show their concerns over the project.

One reason for advocacy groups to fight against the project is that the generic top-level domain names might confuse users, who are highly accustomed to the standard ones.

What is more, a move like this one might make phishing and fraud schemes much easier for people who are using the internet for scamming others. What is more, persons which hunt new domain names to resell them to companies when these want to go online might enjoy this opportunity to make some easy extra dollars.

ICANN officials have announced that they will proceed very slowly and carefully at implementing the project. According to them, the two main tools that will be used to protect both company and users from internet hustlers will be approving every request for a domain name individually, and the pricing strategy. According to the organization, getting a custom top-level domain name will cost a person or company about $100, 000.