Start your engines all those of you who have hopes of becoming top-level domain name registrars, which seems to be the opportunity du jour. On Thursday this week ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees the Internet domain name world so that it’s not completely chaotic, will begin accepting applications to manage a whole new set of top-level domains that could include just about any word.  Think dot-electronics or dot-snowboardingsafaris.   Opening up a vast array of potential top-level domains will no doubt have the domain-name speculators out in force.

Those speculators, like Kentucky entrepreneur Jeffrey Smith, have been waiting for this day for a long time.  If you become the “overseer” for a top-level domain (a registry holder), you can sell your names to registrars such as GoDaddy.com LLC, who then sell the secondary names (those left of the dot) to people who want to own a particular Web address.  But, it’s not as simple as selling the name.  The holder has to “determine who will be eligible to use it and has to provide the technology that will enable the domain to function.” For example, dot-jobs is reserved for the human resource management community (sponsored by Employ Media LLC) and dot-cat is reserved for the Catalan Linguistic and cultural community (sponsored by Fundacio puntCat.) And you thought dot-cat was for cat lovers.  According to Sarah Needleman’s great article in the WSJ today, Smith and his partners, who started their business in 2000, want to be the registrars for the dot-shop domain.  They believe that in a few years dot-shop will be as common as dot-com.