On January 12, ICANN began carrying out its controversial new plan. As WebProNews previously reported, the organization made the historical decision last year to expand the number of generic top-level domain (gTLD) names to an unlimited number. What this means is that the 22 domain name endings, including .com, .org, and others that currently exist could turn into .brand going forward.

In June, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) made a historic move to open domain name endings beyond the 20 or so that currently exist to an unlimited number. This means that the .com, .net, .org, and others that consumers are familiar with could turn into .brand in the near future.

Farmers and ranchers with ties to the American Farm Bureau Federation may want to call the nonprofit and see if it happens to be doing anything special.  Farm Bureau should have more than a few dollars to spare, since it turns out the sale of FB.com to Facebook probably netted it around $8.5 million.

As you might remember, the transaction was announced in November, and Mark Zuckerberg made it sound rather insignificant (and funny) by stating, "The Farm Bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell farm subsidies."

The Federal Trade Commission said today it has shut down the operations of Canadian con artists who allegedly acted as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of U.S. consumers to pay bogus bills by making them believe they would lose their website addresses unless they paid.

Typo-prone photographers appear to owe Yahoo a "thank you."  After making at least one generous offer and then resorting to a lawsuit, the company’s acquired Flicker.com, presumably for the sake of saving people who misspell "Flickr" from visiting the wrong site.

Yahoo’s acquired a new domain name, and while we don’t expect that Facebook and Twitter are quaking in fear, there’s reason to believe it’ll play a significant role in Yahoo’s "social" future.  The Me.me domain name will, naturally enough, tie in to Yahoo’s microblogging site, Meme.

Meme has been described as a Twitter clone with random references to dogs instead of birds.  Otherwise, it’s attracted very little attention at all.

How important is your domain name to you brand? Most online businesses would probably consider it to be quite important, and with good reason. Sometimes before searching, customers may simply opt to go to the "yourbrandhere.com" URL simply because it makes sense. Now, sometimes that URL is already taken, and for start-ups, that’s something to consider in itself.

Back in 2008, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced that he wanted to shut down 141 Internet gambling sites in the state in an effort to stop unregulated online gaming. He filed a civil suit against the domain names and asked the court to force the sites to block access to Kentucky users or give up control of their domain names.

Google’s empire hasn’t exactly crumbled, and to be honest, the average person will probably never even realize what’s happened.  But what’s happened is this: for just the second time in its history, Google’s lost a domain name dispute.

Google submitted a complaint about a site called Groovle to the National Arbitration Forum (which ICANN lets decide domain name disputes) on November 6th of this year.  The search giant argued that Groovle is "nearly identical or confusingly similar" to its own name.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for managing Internet domain names, has announced it will no longer be controlled by the U.S. government.

ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce signed an agreement today supporting the model of international multi-stakeholder governance of the global Internet addressing system.

ICANN was created in 1998 to manage the Internet’s addressing system such as top-level domain-names and IP address space. The group has been criticized for being too influenced by the U.S. government.

The Internet added 24 million new domain names in 2008, according to the fourth quarter 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief by VeriSign.

The year ended with a total of 177 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domains (TLDs). This represents 16 percent growth over the previous year. In the fourth quarter, more than 10.1 million new domain names were registered across all TLDs.

The five largest TLDs in terms of size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to approve lifting restrictions on the classification of domain names, allowing for new customized Web addresses.

A unanimous vote by ICANN members at a public meeting in Paris paves the way for businesses and individuals to adopt domain names based on any combination of letters. Previously domain names had been limited by geography.

America.com, thought to be one of the most valuable domain names, has frustrated its owner by failing to sell at auction.

Last week bidding reached just $1.7 million, far short of the seller’s expectations. Before the auction there was speculation that America.com would surpass the $12.5 million paid for Sex.com.

The record price paid for a domain was last year’s sale of Business.com to a phone directory publisher for $350 million.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is experiencing a digital divide, according to German industry association Bitkom.

Western German states, including Hesse and Bavaria, have the majority of Internet addresses ending in the German ".de" country code domain, with the country’s five former Communist eastern states landing at the bottom of the list.

You know those monkeys that are supposed to recreate the works of Shakespeare?  Judging from some of the strange domain names Google owns, the company appears to have hired a handful of them.

Google had launched an application in January 2004 called WHOIS, that was later withdrawn. However, now according to Matt Cutts, the WHOIS feature has been released again.

By entering a simplistic web address such as whois google.com, a user would be able to know the creation and the expiration date of the domain.

A Maryland man has sold the domain name "pizza.com" for $2.6 million.

Chris Clark paid $20 to register the domain name back in 1994, hoping it would help his Internet consulting business get a contract with a pizza company. He never received a contract and sold the business in 2000.

If you want to learn about the Fox Business Network, foxbusinessnetwork.com is not the place to do it.  That domain name belongs to Worldwide Directory Services, and, according to a ruling by the World International Property Organization, WDS will continue to be its owner.

A British cruise operator has paid a record $1.1 million for the domain name cruises.co.uk.

Seamus Conlon company already owned the address cruise.co.uk so the letter "s" proved to be an expensive acquisition. The price breaks the earlier record for a .co.uk domain of $300,000 paid in October last year.

According to SEDO, internet domain name sales in the secondary market totaled GBP37 Million.

Sedo, the leading online market place for buying and selling Internet domain names and websites, has launched its annual report on the growth of the secondary Internet domain name market in 2007.

The report, which has tracked the state of the secondary Internet domain market annually since 2004, unveils the latest figures for 2007.

Perhaps we’re just happy it’s Friday, but this sounds like good news all around: CNN has bought the domain iReport.com for $750,000.

Bill Hartzer has performed a very interesting piece of domain name research and written up a detailed synopsis on the way Network Solutions seems to be taking advantage of the consumers who use their domain name look-up tool.