The new roots names have been proposed by the companies that would like to administer them and were willing to pay a $50,000 application fee. A total of 46 companies anted up to get a chance to operate a new TLD. Some proposed multiple TLDs; one proposed 117 new TLDs ranging from .soup to .sucks (which is, presumably, not for vacuum cleaners). ICANN has not announced when final decisions will be made.

I can understand the desire of companies to want to get in on the domain-name game. Being the registrar for .com, .net, and .org sure put Network Solutions on the map, but do they or does anyone really believe that more TLDs will ever undercut the supremacy of the .com world in which we live?

www.amazon.*
One TLD suggested by multiple companies was .kids. Sounds great, right? The U.S. might just say, all .kids companies resident in the United States must comply with COPPA (the children''s online privacy and protection act) - or the registrar itself could require compliance in their terms of agreement. What do you suppose you would find at Amazon.kids? How about IBM.kids? What about McDonalds.kids? The only domain that probably would be different from the .com equivalent would be sex.kids, which would either be about teaching kids about responsible sex, if a public service organization registered it first, or about why sex isn''t appropriate for kids if a religious group got a hold of it.

Chances are, regardless of what the TLD is, Amazon (the bookseller) will snap up every Amazon domain name, using Amazon.kids for a children''s book, toy, and DVD store, Amazon.film for a DVD and book store focusing on film, Amazon.politics for a store featuring books and movies about politics and public policy, and Amazon.writer to recruit new writers for the ebooks store they''re probably mulling over.

The trademarks issue alone is going to help no one but the lawyers. Will this create more opportunities for squatters? Do the already existing dotcom sites have a right to the new TLDs bearing their domain name? What about a not-yet-online business that wants to purchase a domain name to match their business name?

Waging War on Cybersquatters
The domain name registrar for the .ws domain, WebSite.ws, was originally designated for companies whose businesses were in or about Western Samoa. It recently announced that it was "waging war on cybersquatters" by reserving the domain names of the Fortune 500 public companies, the Fortune 500 private companies, the top 200 Internet companies, and all professional sports teams. It''s holding these names for ninety days "to give companies a chance to register the equivalent .ws address to their current dotcom address proactively, thus avoiding potential litigation at a later date." WebSite.ws has been in business since 1999 and began selling their domain names in March 2000, so the ninety day freeze comes more than six months after the domains have been available to the public. In that time, they''ve registered 85,000 .ws domains - most of which have not been for Western Samoan businesses. This is the "second and final attempt to provide companies with the opportunity to establish their .ws presence and rightly protect their trademarked names from cybersquatters."

Does WebSite.ws really care that much about saving litigation costs for these big companies? I think it''s just trying very hard to be relevant. In it''s press release on this topic, it reported that it had contacted Nordstrom''s to give them a chance to get their dot-com equivalent domain name, and Nordstrom''s had said no thanks. Perhaps it''s just hoping that it can add 1,200-plus new domains to the number they''ve already registered. WebSite.ws charges $35 per domain, many times the cost of registering a domain with any number of .com registrars, which will do it for under $10.

Ask the Experts
Clearly I''m not the only one who thinks that these alternative domains are irrelevant. Rather than paying some of the top research firms - or even calling them and asking for their comments for publication -- to find out what they think of the threat to .com that .ws will provide, I checked to see which of them had bothered to register their .ws equivalents. I checked the .ws dot-com equivalents for Jupiter Communications (www.jup.com), Gartner Group (www.gartner.com), Forrester Research (www.forrester.com), IDC (www.idc.com), Boston Consulting Group (www.bcg.com), and the Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com). Only Forrester''s domain equivalent is registered and it doesn''t even belong to Forrester Research.

K.I.S.S.
The fundamental rule of advertising, politics, and engagement proposals is "keep it simple, stupid." The new TLDs break that rule. Rather than seeking more names and more ways to categorize the Web, businesses should be seeking more ways to make themselves easier to find. The future lies with companies like RealNames (www.realnames.com), which allows you to register your real company name and keywords for your business, not with an increase in the number of non-intuitive ways companies can be found.

Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. Her newest book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena will be out in October. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com