It's enough to drive you dotty. Next month the organisation which controls website names is likely to approve a new set of addresses - so the day is coming when you can click goodbye to .com, .org and many other familiar internet suffixes.
In their place will come more specific formulations, such as .shop (for an online shop), .travel (for a travel agency), .sex or .xxx (for a sex-oriented site), .web (for a web-only business), and .store (an online store).
The move is similar to changing telephone prefixes and is caused by a similar growth in users, but critics say it will herald a new gold rush, with 'cybersquatters' grabbing the best names and then selling them off.
John Cunningham, director of the website hosting company IE Internet, said: 'Domain aggregators have developed software that runs through every word in the dictionary and identifies those that have not been registered as internet domain names. They will apply this to the new suffixes and buy up all the available names very quickly.'
The money to be made in domain name registration is phenomenal. A US company called DotTV is raking in millions from around the world through the .tv suffix which is registered to the impoverished Pacific island nation of Tuvalu (in the same way that .uk is owned by Britain). DotTV agreed to pay Tuvalu (population: 10,600) $50 million (£35 million) in royalties over the next decade - about three times its gross domestic product - in return for selling email and web addresses ending in .tv.
Koloa Talake, a 60-year-old member of Tuvalu's parliament, said: 'We were very, very, very poor, but now we are getting some money from the marketing of assets like .tv. We are very lucky to strike such a deal .We will be able to build things we would otherwise not be able to build. I know there are some countries here in the South Pacific that are very jealous.'
On DotTVs site you can check in seconds if a name has been taken and, if it hasn't, you can register a bid. Lou Kerner, DotTV's managing director, said: 'It's the most recognisable two-letter symbol on the planet. When you marry "dot" with "TV", you become something very meaningful on the internet.'
Kerner added: 'Everybody knows the problems with .com - it's cluttered, it has no cachet, and it's difficult or impossible to get the name you want.' More than eight million .com names are registered, compared with one million in .net and .org combined. To create more space, entrepreneurs like DotTV have been convincing countries to sell their suffixes. The former Soviet republic of Moldova has a deal with a Florida company which sells the suffix .md to doctors at $299 a time.
