The organization responsible for assigning domain names made a decision this week to shake up the familiar names used to navigate the Web. For years, people have been used to typing endings such as ".com" or ".gov" to visit websites. Soon it will be possible for companies and individuals to create their own top-level domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced:

New gTLDs will change the way people find information on the Internet and how businesses plan and structure their online presence. Internet address names will be able to end with almost any word in any language, offering organizations around the world the opportunity to market their brand, products, community or cause in new and innovative ways.

"Today's decision will usher in a new Internet age," said Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of ICANN's Board of Directors. "We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration."

Companies and organizations will be under pressure to lay claim to valuable domain names before rivals can get to them. However, the cost and difficulty of obtaining one of the new domain names could deter "cybersquatters," who buy potentially valuable names and wait to make money by selling them to interested parties. Martinne Geller of Reuters writes:

Aside from the application fee, Bourne said owners have to pay about $25,000 a year to maintain each registry and $50,000 to $75,000 a year for technical functions often outsourced to a registry operator. Over the course of a 10-year period, he said that could amount to as much as $2 million per domain name.

For the largest consumer products companies, which have dozens of brands, that could run to many millions of dollars.

"But the next question is, what do they actually do with it?" Bourne said. "What can you do with .coke that you can't do with coke.com?"

Well, custom domain names could be useful if companies can come up with clever uses for them. For example, large companies could use them for an interesting "theme park" effect. Disney, for example, might be able to direct visitors who arrive at its main website, Disney.go.com, to a series of pages hosted at .disney. I could envision these reflecting the company's popular brands and the relationships between them. It would take time and money to design this well and to give the sense of scope that would justify using .disney as opposed to having a bunch of Disney-themed web pages hosted at .com.

However, having a special top-level domain isn't likely to boost your search ranking, according to Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan:

Go do a search for "travel" now or any popular travel-related term on Google. Count the number of times you see sites coming up with .travel in their domain name. You won't need more than one hand. You probably won't need more than one finger. You probably won't need any fingers at all.

Search engines like Google and Bing give no particular credit or boost to generic top level domain names in general. They don't say, "Hmm, .com — that's more important than .net, give it a boost." They don't say "Hmm, .travel, boost any site with that over other travel sites."

It's never been easy to keep information from spreading across the Internet, as a recent legal fight between a prominent UK soccer player and the Twitter user behind an anonymous account illustrates.

Forbes explains the basic details of the case:

After a Twitter user alleged sexual indiscretions by a host of British celebrities that were allegedly protected by super injunctions, it set off a firestorm, forcing British lawmakers to think about whether such a thing is still feasible in the age of social media, and if it is, how to enforce it. One of the celebs, a soccer player who is alleged to have a super injunction for scoring goals with a woman who was not his wife, has filed a lawsuit to find out who the user behind the anonymous @InjunctionSuper account is. His lawyers identify him as "CTB" in the lawsuit, but it quickly emerged through social media and the American press (which is not subject to the super injunction) that the client was Manchester United player Ryan Giggs.

Newspapers have stepped into the mix as well. The Guardian describes how a Scottish newspaper used Giggs as the bait for a special report on privacy laws:

The Scottish newspaper, which the Guardian cannot name for legal reasons, devoted its front page to a large picture of the footballer's face, with a black band across his eyes and the word "censored" in capital letters. The player is easily recognisable.

Below the picture is the text: "Everyone knows that this is the footballer accused of using the courts to keep allegations of a sexual affair secret. But we weren't supposed to tell you that ..."

Politicians have also taken the opportunity to question current privacy law, particularly John Hemming, the MP for Birmingham Yardley.

To the condemnation of some of his colleagues, Hemming, who has been campaigning on the issue, exercised parliamentary privilege to identify the star at the centre of the injunction just minutes after the high court refused to lift a ban on naming the sportsman, who is said to have had a relationship with Imogen Thomas, the former Big Brother contestant.

"With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it's obviously impractical to imprison them all," Hemming said.

The circumstances of this case may seem frivolous, but they get at larger issues about freedom of speech.

The New York Times writes:

And while a debate centering on an athlete's love life might not seem to be the most pressing example of free speech online, there are broader and more urgent implications, analysts said.

"If you step back, that same sort of protection is really vital to have in place when you're talking about the individuals involved in a revolution or a social movement like the Arab Spring," said Thomas R. Burke, a chairman of the media law practice at the firm Davis Wright Tremaine.

Whatever the higher ideals brought out by the controversy, it's also been good for Twitter's traffic, according to the BBC:

Obviously the San Francisco-based site did not set out to be at the centre of a British media firestorm. But the result, according to some figures I've been shown, has been a big surge in traffic.

Experian Hitwise, which gets its data from internet service providers, says UK traffic to Twitter's website hit a new high on Saturday, as a footballer's attempts to use the courts to identify people behind various tweets dominated the headlines. The traffic was 22% higher than the previous day.

Facebook is often criticized over privacy. Just think of the launch of Beacon.

But listening to CTO Bret Taylor defend the company's privacy practices yesterday at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, it's hard to fault the company's technology. Facebook is in many ways at the cutting edge of Internet security and privacy--and it has to be considering the large quantity of personal information that it stores.

Facebook's privacy woes have not been caused by technical bungling. It's hard to imagine, for example, the company suffering the sort of ongoing technical humiliation that Sony has recently experienced. Facebook's record so far has been much better than that. Rather, it's Facebook's tendency to suddenly change the rules that have landed it in hot water.

Taylor's discussion of how Facebook handles user privacy was thoughtful and impressive. "People will stop using Facebook if they lose trust in their services," he said, a line we also heard from Google in last week's hearing. He went on to outline the ways that Facebook allows users to control what happens to their data, in particular the fine-grained privacy controls that allow users to select who can see their posts. Users can set different policies for photos, status updates, and other kinds of content, and can even set special privacy policies for specific posts.

"We cannot satisfy people's privacy expectations by creating a one size fits all approach," Taylor argued.

Taylor highlighted that the company has worked with partners on new authentication technologies that allow users to share information with third parties safely, and noted, "We are one of the few Internet companies to extend our privacy controls to our mobile interfaces."

He added that the company also offers different default settings for minors, and is currently testing a new, more transparent privacy policy for all users.

What Taylor didn't talk about is Facebook's habit of changing its default privacy settings without giving users much notice. The last time this happened, for example, users logged into Facebook and were confronted with a long description of changes to how their would be shared. Few have the patience to sit down, understand the changes, and fix them.

This is where the company keeps going wrong. And no matter how sophisticated or thoughtful its privacy and security technology, Facebook can't fix its problems until it gets the human factor right.