The End of the Dot Com.

There was so much hype about 2012 before we entered 2012. Apocalypse was supposed to knock at our doors. Mabus the Third Anti-Christ was widely conjectured to wreak havoc on Earth. And the Anunnakis were prognosticated to descend from Planet Nbiru to bail us out. Fortunately or unfortunately, the story so far has been rather anti-climactic.

The only shattering event that I can foresee, will in all likelihood, play out on June 13. On that historic day, the World Wide Web will be restructured beyond recognition by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers).

Before you go, ‘Fhat the wuck’, let me explain: On June 13, the ICANN in its capacity as the Godfather of the Internet will reveal the suffixes that will be blessed with the halo of a generic Top Level Domain (gTLD). What that means is a whole new set of gTLDs would supplement the well known suffixes such as .com, .net, .org and .edu.

To understand the seismic impact of this move, just think of ‘Dot Com’ as Doordarshan and the new gTLDs as satellite channels with their own satellites! You get the picture, right?

The privatization of domain name suffixes will end the dot com monopoly like never before as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and all the other big fat evil corporations are plotting and scheming to bag their own dot names.

What’s even scarier for the Dot Com guys is the gold rush to own whole ‘industries’, ‘communities’ and ‘attitudes’. If rumours are to be believed, Google has already placed a bid to buy .Lol. Many more megacorps are slugging it out for .bank, .home, .ngo, .music, .shop, .green, .app, .game, .artist, .free, .gay, .hotel, .radio, .car, .sucks and 2000 other variations!

Even our usually languid Indian companies have hopped on to the race to be on the dot. One learns that .tata, .sbi, .mahindra, .reliance, .infosys, .wipro and 8 other dot companies are on the verge of being approved.

With such an unimaginable scale of fragmentation on the cards, the simple world of Dot Coms that we knew will come crashing down in the next few weeks. Shall we blame it all, on the Mayans?