The Internet is getting a facelift. By the end of 2013, the first of more than 1400 new applied-for Internet addresses will pop up in place of that old friend “.com” as the Internet authority ICANN awards new top-level domains. If you’re one of many who didn’t get the dotcom address you wanted, here comes half a ton of new top-level domains to the rescue.

With more than a thousand unique new web address “opportunities” comes the Cheshire cat’s question to your organization: Who are you? Where should your organization be in the new Internet taxonomy? Or is the problem that you can—and maybe should—register in many new TLDs?

Is your venerable mybusiness.com the best way to connect with your customers, or should your auto-related business get into a snazzy new domain like mybusiness.auto or mybusiness.cars as part of this new online marketing paradigm? Answering that question entails reexamining who you are in this brave new Internet. And yes, there is a .WTF proposed as a top level domain—more about that later. So get ready to say hello to new worlds on the Web, what business media are calling the “big bang” of domain names.

The new gTLds include commercial categories of broad general interest:

• .play
• .dog
• .career
• .camera
• .health
• .fishing
• .wedding
• .clothing
• .gay
• .yachts

Some of the new bTLDs are familiar brands

• .apple
• .delmonte
• .samsclub
• .fiat
• .showtime
• .mcd &.mcdonalds
• .aaa
• .chase
• .epson
• .godaddy

Many new gTLDs define themselves by geography

• .helsinki
• .tokyo
• .paris
• .broadway
• .swiss
• .budapest
• .berlin
• .africa
• .melbourne
• .nyc

Of course, a slew of new gTLDs aim directly at e-commerce:

• .cloud
• .app
• .web
• .site
• .blog
• .chat
• .digital
• .mobile
• .secure
• .online

The overwhelming number of possibilities is daunting. ICANN’s current list is here.

Expanding eddresses to Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic and other languages

At the same time, the World Wide Web grows more worldly. A flock if internationalized domain names (IDNs) are in the mix. First, those languages based on the Latin alphabet:

• .abogado .(Spanish for lawyer)
• .casa .(Spanish for home)
• .vin (French for wine)
• .reise and .reisen (German for travel and .travels)
• .letzt (German for now)
• .bom (Portugese for good)
• .passagens (Portugese for.passages)
• .immobilien (German for real estate)
• .Cymru (Welch for Wales)
• .versicherung (German for insurance)

ICANN is also adding up to 116 non-Latin character gTLDs in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Russian, and other languages:

• .网址 (Chinese for site)
• .购物 (Chinese for shopping)
• .ストア (Japanese for store)
• .セール .(Japanese for sale)
• .ファッション (Japanese for fashion)
• .باز[O4] ار   (Arabic for bazaar)
• .קום (Hebrew for .com)
• .天主敎  (Chinese for Catholi)
• .一号店 .(Chinese for number one store)

Or are you perfectly satisfied with your .com as is, thank you? Many critics wonder aloud if this new domain business is much ado about nothing, and that could turn out to be the case.

But this expansion is part of a common pattern in mass media. As a medium launches with limited outlets like the radio and TV networks of yesteryear. The “content” of those media was fairly generic. Television networks sought, the “least objectionable material” so a general audience would engage and not change the channel.

Later, radio and TV stations proliferated to dozens, then hundreds. The game changed.  Building and keeping an audience was about uniqueness, focusing on a narrow specialty: a science cable channel, a jazz radio station, live baseball.

So are we leaving the generic .com (which currently accounts for three-quarters of the current URLs in the world), the .org, the .gov and a handful of others for the .coffee, .yoga, .wtf and of course, .sucks.

Regarding .WTF, this top-level domain was applied-for by Donuts, Inc., the single largest applicant for new gTLDs with 306 applications submitted. The application explains, “WTF is a pop-culture term that is attractive to registrants seeking new avenues for expression on the Internet, and who are perhaps interested in demonstrations of irony, skepticism, humor, and critique. Individuals and groups will register names in .WTF when interested in editorializing, providing input, interacting with other communities, and publishing commentary.”

Stay tuned.

–Joe Gold

Joe Gold is a technology editor, SEO-fortified content maven, and science fiction author of The Lamp Post Motel. He assembled and edits the evoke.law site. Joe’s portfolio is at goldscribe.com.