Big Opportunities Ahead for Smart Energy Investors on Internet Reform

Many of our readers are affluent investors seeking to better their fiscal situation.

So, below is one of the best news tips you'll receive in 2011 for making money.

That's the good news - the downside is that the opportunity won't come cheap.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that it will accept applications for domains with new suffixes from 12 January 20212.

What does this mean?

Simple - next January, the restrictions on previous Internet high-level domain names are about to expand. That includes ones in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Japanese and other non-Latin scripts.

While this will undoubtedly cause a surge of national pride, with foreign countries freed from the tyranny of the Latin, alphabet, this is not the issue of most importance to readers of this column.

ICANN's decision promises to transform the Domain Name System, assigned by ICANN, since its creation in the 1980s.
Currently, more than 300 suffixes are currently available,  most of them top-level (TLD) country-code domains, such as "u.s." for the United States, ".jp" for Japan,  ".uk" for the United Kingdom and '.de' for Germany.

The ICANN changes mean that potentially millions more suffixes could now be created, ranging on topics from industry to geography to ethnicity.

Now, the downside.

The new ICANN domain name suffixes are hardly a giveaway, as the application fee is $185,000, and those selected will have to pay $25,000 annual maintenance fee to retain it.

ICANN has already allowed two major expansions of the addressing system, as eleven years ago it approved seven new domains, including ".info" and ".biz." In 2004 ICANN began considering additional new bids and since then has added seven new top-level domain names, including ".xxx" for pornography in March 2011.

ICANN is not thinking small, as according to its expansion plan, the future bidding process will be both streamlined and open to all companies, organizations and individuals.
There is certainly room for expansion, as there are already are more than 94 million registered under ".com."

So gentlemen, place your bets. Oilprice's top recommendations for what will be fought over more furiously that Marylyn Monroe's iconic white dress from the "Seven Year Itch" include: .energy, .oil (most likely the top two), .gas, .naturalgas, .natgas, .gas, .coal, .windpower, .pipelines, .electricity, .solar and .hydroelectric.

By. John Daly for OilPrice.com