Brace yourself for a new era of creative web addresses.

ICANN, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has opened up top-level domains, the little .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .net suffixes or country abbreviation at the end of a web address, to any styling the human mind can conceive – and in scripts other than Roman – provided the creator coughs up $100,000.

The decision, which should benefit ICANN’s coffers, could unleash a certain amount of cybersquatting, a form of greenmail, despite the necessity of a business plan.

ICANN will start taking applications next April and the first of the new suffixes should be in operation by the end of next year.

Currently there are 71 million addresses that use .com, 11.2 million that use .de (Germany), 10.6 million that use .net and 10.5 million that use .cn (China), the last up 31% in the last three months.

Meanwhile, for its trouble, ICANN’s own domains were hijacked by Turkish hackers known as NetDevitz and redirected to a page that said: “You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us? haha