Not enough beach front property? Just build more beach. The approach that spawned Dubai’s reclaimed palm fronds is coming to the internet, in the process creating plenty of potential winners and losers.

The change relates to top-level domains – the last part of a website address such as dot-com, or dot-gov. While near infinite variation is possible in addresses for individual web pages, there are at present a mere 21 different top-level identifiers in use, excluding country-specific designations such as dot-uk or dot-us. However, from next year the non-profit industry group that co-ordinates the addressing system, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will start taking applications for new top-level domains.