Everyone would be familiar with the universal resource locator (URL) or domain name that uses .com, .org, .net, etc., with optionally a two letter country code following - all administered by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

gTLD allows registration of almost any name in almost any language without regional border restrictions. These can be in non-Latin (US-ASCII) scripts including Arabic, Chinese, Kanji, Hangul, Hebrew, Tamil, or Cyrillic – to name few.

The privilege of owning a gTLD does not come cheap or easy. At the ‘Reveal day’ in June 2012 some 1,930 applications were published – 751 were contested.

Generic words such as .bank, .book, etc., will cost millions of dollars – other company specific names could cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Like all things early adopters will get the lowest price.

Naturally, Amazon, Google, and dozens of other entrepreneurs with deep pockets have tried to register multiple gTLD’s in the hope that these will appreciate, as they can be on-sold or licenced.

Critics say that this is the beginning of the end for using URL’s to locate a company or a local based supplier – but the old system remains so that is not strictly true. But it will mean that generic names like bank, music, books etc., will be ‘hijacked’ and become synonymous with its owner.

Proponents say that getting a unique URL is near impossible resulting in ones that are too long to be of use. According to domain registrars, the longest legal domain name is 63 characters starting with a letter or number but pre or post sub-domains can take that up to 2.038 characters when Microsoft Internet Explorer objects.

We understand that www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com is currently the longest domain name in use. Anything too long usually induces typing mistakes and these tend to use one of the alias services e.g. bitly.com which uses a short TLD as the base to allow for companies and others to use names specific to its brand or products.

The list of recently approved gTLDs is here. - this is not the full list.

*Note that the headline reference to one of Commonwealth Bank’s more popular marketing slogans – 'Which Bank' – could open up a copyright can of worms with the owner of gTLD .bank that may have conflicting trademark rights in this hypothetical example.