Soon Very Soon
Many of you have tried in the past to secure a domain name only to find that it was already taken. In many cases the names are owned by speculators who are hoping to be able to sell the names for a profit. The bad news for domain name speculators is that there will soon be access to many more domain name extensions.

As of the most current meetings in April 2000 of the Names Council of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN www.icann.org) the following consensus was achieved;

The Names Council determines that the report of Working Group C and related comments indicate that there exists a consensus for the introduction of new domain names in a measured and responsible manner.

(http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/20000419.NCgtlds-statement.html)

The current plan is to initially roll out 6 to 10 new name extensions and evaluate the effects. At this point the new extensions haven't been officially released, but some of the candidates are .arts, .store, .law and .firm. After the evaluation period ends some proposals are calling for the roll out of up to 500 extensions.

Protection for Trade-Marks
Quite often speculators in the past have registered popular trade marked names (i.e. sony.com) in the hopes that when the company eventually developed their Web site they would want to purchase their name back. In some case this worked, the names were bought or in other cases they would get entangled in court battles. To additionally protect trademark owners the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act was signed into law in the United States in November 1999. The act is intended to prevent domain name registrants from registering names of trademark owners for the purpose of reselling them to the owners. Currently there are a few cases before the courts from some of the big players such as Amazon.com.

The ICANN Names Council is also currently trying to incorporate additional Trade-Mark protections in the domain name registration system itself. As of May 19, 2000 little headway had been made into how this will be achieved. The roll out of the new domain name extensions may be delayed until the Trade-Mark issue is resolved. (http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/20000519.NCftm-resolution.html)

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