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Codebreaker

Domain name land rush

John Moe Feb 7, 2011

Starting tomorrow, [lots of investors and entrepreneurs are headed to San Francisco]( ) for the .nxt conference. It’ll be lots of discussions about the new domain names — websites that end in things like .eco, .god, gay, .sport. It’s a subject the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has been debating for quite some time, and now if you want a new domain name, you’ve got to pay ICANN $185,000 to apply. These address aren’t going to go live until next year, but it could mean big business for domain name operators From the Washington Post:

The future operator of .sport, for instance, could sell as many as 200,000 or more Web addresses – hockey.sport, bethesda.sport or washingtoncapitals.sport – for wholesale prices ranging from $6 to $50 to such companies as Go Daddy. These firms then re-sell the Web sites to consumers for higher prices. [Kieren] McCarthy also said ICANN is debating whether the domain operators could sell Web addresses directly to the consumer themselves.

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