Instead of branching out into alternate domains, companies and organizations opted to stay within .com, .org and .net, even if it meant using longer domain names such as .

USA Today's is spot-on: It will be expensive for business owners. Thousands of firms have already spent a lot of money buying their company and product names, and even likely misspellings in the .com domain. Some even buy up potential names that competitors or grudge-bearing customers might want to use. For example, ABC Widget company might buy both abcwidget.com and abcwidgetsucks.com.

If ICANN's plan goes into action, it'll allow what will seem like an infinite number of possible URLs. Competitors and opponents can potentially register them, to steal traffic away from authentic sites. Business owners told the paper that they fear another round of spending to lock out domain claim-jumpers.

It's also not certain how well the new domains will go down with the public. Mainstream Internet users will probably see the new custom domains as too complicated, like 9-digit ZIP codes. The ad hoc standard of cramming a series of words into a .com domain such as thestandard.com, seems to work fine for just about everyone. Most Internet users have figured out that Googling the name of a company, person or organization usually finds the correct site, so there's no need to memorize a long URL in the first place.

To be fair, USA Today namechecks one potential hotspot: A .eco (or perhaps .green) domain, for organizations that want to position themselves as environmentally friendly.