Plain dotty

Just when you thought you were getting a handle on all the dot-commery flummery - that a ".com" can be any sort of company or encyclopaedia site or purveyor of sex toys - it all gets complicated again. Icann, the company which decides what new "domains" (eg, .com or .gov) to allocate is finally going to allow a handful of new ones.

Just when you thought you were getting a handle on all the dot-commery flummery - that a ".com" can be any sort of company or encyclopaedia site or purveyor of sex toys - it all gets complicated again. Icann, the company which decides what new "domains" (eg, .com or .gov) to allocate is finally going to allow a handful of new ones.

Among the possibilities are suffixes such as .shop, .store (is there a difference?), .web, .travel, .news and, for the sexually-minded, .sex or perhaps .xxx. They've missed out the one that would appeal to music fans, namely .mp3, but no doubt they'll get round to it.

The question is: why? Icann says companies need more "space" for new names in. We say: life is pleasantly simple in a world where only the well-named survive. Distinguishing between lastminute.com and lastminute.travel and lastminute.store will be good news only for the advertising agencies already bombarding us with instantly-forgotten company names.

No, let's assign this idea to our own new dot.com site: letsnotdoit.com.