At precisely noon on April 22, 1889, a captain from the Fifth Cavalry gave the signal and the bugler blew reveille. Some said the earth literally shook the instant following the bugler’s notes. Thousands of horses and wagons raced forward. The first train belched black smoke and began moving. Noise, dust, and confusion abounded as approximately 50,000 men, women, and children rushed for only 12,000 available tracts of land … The Oklahoma Land Rush had begun.” — Adapted from “Built in a Day: The Oklahoma Land Rush,” The Museum Gazette, U.S. National Park Service, April 2001.
On Jan. 12, 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization governing the assignment of internet addresses, will begin accepting applications to expand the internet registry space by allowing entities to create, register, and operate customized generic top-level domains. This program, which affords organizations the unprecedented opportunity to stake their own claim in cyberspace by owning and operating their own gTLDs, has the potential to cause significant change in the way users navigate the internet. Rather than searching for and using extensions such as dot-com, dot-net, and the handful of others dominating the internet, users might navigate toward websites at a variety of dot-generic and dot-brand extensions.
