Icann opens things up

Icann's recent decision to effectively relax the rules on registering domain names has again highlighted the importance of choosing the right suffix to represent your organisation on the web. Although it is often relegated behind web site design and content management issues, domain name management is now crucial to the success of a business or the effectiveness of a public sector organisation online.
Icann's historic Paris vote throws the cat among the pigeons somewhat because it paves the way for firms to register any word as a suffix, not just the usual .coms and .uks. So in the future we could see regional generic names like .sco for Scotland and .lon for London, we could see popular brand names like .Polo, .Mars and so on, and other more unusual or generic names.
Most firms' traditional policy when it comes to registering domain names, is to decide which names are closest to their own url, including ones with small variations likely to be typed in erroneously by users, and then snap them up before domain speculators get their hands on them and try to monetise their investment. Ultimately it's brand protection, defensive registration, and it needs to be done across all of the major TLDs.
Well, that strategy has effectively been turned on its head by this latest Icann decision. With infinite variations on your domain name possible, how can any organisation practically buy up all the potentially similar names? Well, they can't really, so in time it's going to be a case of picking the domain name you're comfortable with and want associated with your organisation - tesco.supermarket, for example - and sticking to it. If you then find someone is infringing on your brand rights, then you'll just have to go after them on a case-by-case basis. In fact, with the number of permutations set to multiply at an alarming rate, cybersquatters are likely to find that domain names are a lot more difficult to monetise - as choice increases demand will obviously decrease.
One interesting offshoot of this whole affair could be that users have to rely more heavily than ever before on search engines to locate the organisations they want to connect to - at least until they become familiar with the domain names attached to particular brands. To be honest though, it's more likely that despite this increase in choice for firms and organisations, .com, .uk and the existing TLDs are going to be pretty safe. Why give up an identifiable web address it has taken years to build up, just because you can? Things will certainly get more complicated in the short term for legal, marketing and IT teams, but it's equally easy to see how the novelty could soon wear off.