<--Explains who Icann and the father of the web is.

Icann or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers made what was thought to be an attractive announcement last month when they said that premium domain name auctions would begin for URLs that had been opened up for online travel companies. Based out of the UK, Icann was expecting heavy sales but after the lackluster response, new projections say that domain buying frenzy will not heat up until April 2009.

When I say these are premium domain name auctions I mean it. The average price of the URLs available range between 100,000-200,000 Euros, according to travolution.co.uk. In dollars, that is some heavy cash.

From my understanding, the domain name auctions are not for standard URLs but for TLDs. New extensions are a hot topic and the domain changes released by Icann are creating the possibility of extensions like .hotels or .deals. With this increase in URL extensions one can only assume the increased importance search engines will play in the role of websites gaining exposure. In a few years, there will be so many possible URL names and extensions that SEO will have an even heavy role then seen today.