Is this the end of dotcom? At a meeting this week in Paris, regulators voted to allow companies to buy their own “top-level domains”. TLDs are the last segment of an internet domain name (for example, the “com” in FT.com). At the mo­ment, businesses must choose the suffix for their website address from a list based on what kind of organisation they are, and where they are. But no longer. Rightly, websites will soon be able to choose their own TLD.

Many of these new addresses will be quite predictable (like drink. pepsi, eat.mcdonalds or hillary.clinton2012). But the sky will be the limit (unless, of course, you buy “.outerspace”). Businesses can set up any domain they want. A prize should go to the first to offer a haiku as a web address.