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There's a land rush going on right now. At least that's how everyone seems to be describing the opening up of vast amounts of Internet real estate with so-called top-level domains.

Pretty soon, there's going to be a lot more than .coms out there, and a lot of big companies and a few upstarts are bidding huge amounts to get the new Internet addresses.

To register a domain name you typically go through a commercial domain retailer, like GoDaddy or DomainNames.com. But it is never totally clear who owns the address you're buying.

You might think you're buying it from the government, and that the sale of these new domain names is like selling parts of the radio spectrum for TV or radio broadcasts. It would make sense to think that since the U.S. government created the Internet in the 1980s. But, in a move with staggering implications, the U.S. gave it up to the world.

Regulating Domain Name Space

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is the organization that sprang up to administer the sale and designation of domain names. It is the only governing body that does this, and it developed the rules for who got .coms, .edu, .orgs and regional designations like .uk (United Kingdom) or .ly (Libya).

For the two-letter country codes, ICANN established early on that whoever presents themselves as the designated official representative of that nation's government is allowed to manage the name space from there on.

If it wants, the country or territory can just sell that space, and many have. TV stations and a lot of other companies buy these links because they need short URLs (like n.pr). They're easier to deal with and fit in a 140-character tweet.

That's why domains can be so valuable — and why so many people are excited about the new top-level domains.

The problem with the land rush analogy though is that this isn't land or anything like land. Land is a physical thing, and there is a limited amount. But that doesn't apply to the Internet. ICANN can simply make more virtual real estate, which is exactly what they did.

Who Is Buying?

If you have a few million dollars to spare, and are willing to take a bit of a risk, you too can take advantage of the new top-level domains. Jeff Sass is the marketing director for the newly-minted .CLUB. He can say that now, because his company successfully bid on the .club domain.

"The fee alone was $185,000," Sass tells NPR's Arun Rath. "And then of course there's [the] legal costs and financial papers and other things that have to be done as part of it."

After paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the application and legal fees, they then had to bid for .club in a private auction. The auction went on for several days, but in the end they were victorious. Sass wouldn't say how much exactly they paid for the name, but that his company has raised $8.2 million to date and spent in excess of $5 million so far on obtaining the name and the marketing.

So is shelling out millions for the perfect name space a good strategy? On the Internet, property value is what you make of it.

"If you start thinking about these top-level domains we see that .com is valuable. Will .soda, for soda pop vendors, will that be valuable?" says Charles Severance, who teaches information technology at the University of Michigan. "I think it'll be more about how they make it valuable rather than just getting it."

Severance says there are some people who do get lucky from speculating on and buying domain names, sometimes known as cyber-squatting. But he said that's rare.

"In general, just holding onto a four or six character string, unless you've made it valuable, you have to invest in making it valuable," he says.

In other words, this may not be the kind of land rush that opens up opportunity for the little guys. In fact, ICANN spokesman Brad White doesn't think you should look at it like a land rush at all.

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