Masters of Their Domain By Ethan Smith In August, ICANN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers] will begin accepting applications from any Internet users or organizations with an interest in establishing a new [top-level] domain. Applicants will be required to pay a $50,000 submission fee to cover the costs to evaluate the application. ... One of ICANN's working groups has proposed domain names like '.banc,' '.museum,' '.union,' '.travel' and '.sex.'" � New York Times, July 17, 2000 .PONZI For a submission fee of $500, .ponzi administrator PonziWeb (a limited-liability partnership incorporated on the Caribbean island of Barbuda) will consider applications for new .ponzi-level domains. For an additional fee of just $5,000, PonziWeb will consider applications from individuals or organizations interested in becoming licensed vendors of $500 .ponzi domains and $5,000 vending licenses. .TERROR While the popular view of terrorism emphasizes chaos and extremism, any terror professional will tell you bombings and poison-gas attacks require an integrated end-to-end e-terror solution. There's simply no better place to organize the faithful, publicize demands and build a terrorist community than in the unregulated reaches of cyberspace. .BOMB Investors have wasted countless hours and untold sums of money on startups headed nowhere but the Fuckedcompany.com hall of fame. Now entrepreneurs with hopeless content plans, half-baked incubator schemes and doomed-from-conception e-commerce plays can spare everyone a major headache, lower investor expectations and set themselves up for sleeper success simply by registering online as .bombs. . To establish a Web presence as towering as his two-decade recording career, the most prolific do-it-yourselfer in the music business today deserves nothing short of his own cybersuffix. The Artist Sometimes Known as Prince has changed monikers so often he's likely to come back to the unpronounceable symbol faster than you can say , and Cyb-r-Squat, Inc. has thoughtfully reserved the . domain. Should Prince or decide to take possession of it, all he needs do is reimburse Cyb-r-Squat its ICANN application fee, plus additional convenience charges not to exceed $2 million to $3 million. .OY Silicon Alley, meet the Borscht Belt! Trend-conscious venture capitalists will go meshuga for startups in the ultra-hot oy-commerce space. Bid on Jackie Mason memorabilia on oyBay; bank on Fortune magazine spinoff oyCompany Now within the year. .BOB Would-be Web pioneers frustrated to find their .coms, .orgs and .nets of choice already developed will flock to the wide-open spaces of Bob Throckmorton's new domain. Is a portal behemoth sitting on the URL you'd been eyeballing for your redneck community site? Just stake your claim at Yahoo.bob. .SPELUNKING Vertical business-to-business marketplaces are where it's at, right? Well, so is vertical cave exploration, as any spelunker worth his miner's headlamp can tell you. The field is open in this rock-solid market: Caribiner.spelunking, belay.spelunking, clovehitch.spelunking, batguano.spelunking. .SOY As versatile as the bean it's named for, this all-purpose top-level domain makes a great substitute for meat, wheat, fish, milk � or at least .com, .net and .org. .WHERETHEHELLDOIGO? Net users confused by the inevitable proliferation of top-level domains will need a quick, easy way to help them distinguish among the multitude of sites with the same name. Amazon.wherethehelldoigo, for instance, lets you know exactly what's going on at Amazon.travel (Brazilian rain-forest tours), Amazon.soy (the premier online soy-tailer) and Amazon.museum (online exhibit on endangered e-retail species). -- "Bill Gates did not become the richest man in the world by being Mr. Rogers." Microsoft ex marketing officer
