At ICANN’s meeting in Paris overnight, the regulator voted to relax restrictions on Top Level Domain Names (TLDs), ushering in what will be a huge change to the face of domain names as we know it.
There are two parts to what is proposed. The first is that TLDs will become available in all Unicode character formats, meaning that the current restriction on Roman character only domain names will be abolished in favour of domain names in any valid Unicode format - thus allowing much easier web usage for Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European nations.
The second decision is to allow .whateveryoulike to be a valid TLD. This has long been discussed by ICANN as being the ultimate goal for the regulator and, it would appear now that we’ll have the first new TLDs come online towards the end of next year.
Initially the cost of creating your own TLD will be very high - in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. There will obviously be some companies interested in this route (eg .google or .microsoft would be obvious) and indeed new TLD registrars are likely to pop up around specialist domains like .shop for example.
More details can be seen ICANN’s announcement and the BBC has a good write up of the wider changes.