Although it won't become the wild.west, next year's increase in domain names may mean more wrangling for Internet types.
Websites will no longer be limited to endings such as .com or .org, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers, which handles domain name rules, decided Monday.
"ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination," ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said in a news release.
But web browsers will have to hustle to catch up with the revamped generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, in order to control cookies, said Ian Goldberg, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo who specializes in privacy and security.
Browsers must know how many, and which, words specify a domain to ensure a company can send cookies from its site but not for all sites with the same top-level ending, he said.
"If you can just create these willy nilly, how do the web browsers know what to do?" he questioned.
Only 1,000 .you-name-its will be approved each year, according to ICANN. And at the price of $185,000 per gTLD application, the change certainly won't allow the average net user to create original domains.
Non-Latin characters, such as those in Arabic or Chinese, will be acceptable for gTLDs for the first time.
"There are some potential security issues if people buy confusingly similar top level domains," Mr. Goldberg added.
For example, a fishing site could apply for a .com with a Cyrillic o and create sites such as ebay.c-Cyrillic o-m, Mr. Goldberg said.
"It could cause all sorts of trouble now - it could trick you."
However, ICANN's complex, lengthy application criteria aim to prevent this sort of behaviour. With an entire section on "string similarity" rules, it's unlikely that such a gTLD would pass.
Past cyber squatting behaviour will eliminate an application from the get-go, according to ICANN's criteria. "Business diligence" and criminal history will also be investigated before ICANN will seriously consider the proposed domain, as the owner would have to act as a registry if approved.
Despite the planned checks against bad behaviour, browsers, ICANN, and buyers of unique gTLDs will have to co-operate to make sure things run smoothly, Mr. Goldberg said.
"I wouldn't call it wild west - there are rules," he added.
"We're doing something new, and whenever you do something new, something might go wrong."
As it stands, there are 22 gTLDs such as .net and .travel, as well as 250 country-specific gTLDs, such as .ca and .cn.
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