After the Dot: The Latest Net Revolution

Ask someone to name a website and it’s a virtual certainly they will say something ending with dot com: Amazon.com, eBay.com, Facebook.com, it doesn’t matter what, it’s the same suffix. Dotcom is the internet for most people. But that may all change next year when the top level of the net — the part after the dot — is liberalised. From 2008, anyone wanting their own piece of the internet is welcome to apply for it. It won’t be cheap (there will an application fee of around $100,000) and it won’t be simple (you have to prove you are capable of running a complex piece of the net’s infrastructure) — but it could mean a change in the way the online world works