In June 1996 the hacker Kevin Poulsen walked out of a two-year prison sentence in California. The first thing he saw was a billboard showing an internet address. He was dumbfounded. In just two years, his geeky private world of http and .com had suddenly become big, ordinary business.

Icann’s decision in Paris is just one more step in the internet’s long journey towards the commercial.

The history of domain names has been one of hype and overexcitement. Premium domain names have sold for huge sums, but have often failed to translate into successful businesses. Sex.com has had a long, torrid history of lawsuits, counter-lawsuits and commercial failure, despite once selling for $14 million.

Business.com sold for $7.5 million, but in a Google search for “business”, it doesn’t make the top 10 results.

Still, domain name trading is a big cottage industry. The supply of meaningful domain names is limited by language and human ingenuity. Dot-com start-ups acquire funny names like Flickr because all the real words are taken. Domainers operate in a strange nether-world of the web, buying up thousands of names, sprinkling them with advertisments, and selling the few that become valuable. Google even runs a special advertising system just for domainers (who might prefer to be called “commercial registrants”).

Cybersquatting – buying up brand names and selling them to their rightful owners – is well known, but typosquatting is easier and legally safer. Last year mortage.com (without the “g”) sold for almost $250,000 to a company that also owns morgage.com (without the “t”). Both addresses lead to simple pages covered in advertisments for correctly spelt mortgage services.

Icann is hoping for a profitable land-grab, as its affiliates sign up thousands of new top-level domains at $100,000 each, creating a vast amount of new real estate for domainers and legitimate businesses.

It’s possible that this new land will be filled with exciting new companies and products, and that huge brands like .coke will pay a premium for new sites.

However, the omens are not good. In 2005, Icann approved the .travel domain, which has failed to create any excitement – the Egyptian tourist authority signed up for www.egypt.travel, but the world’s busiest travel sites still live on .com domains.

The most successful new domain has probably been .tv (which belongs to the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu). But the vast majority of online television services, from the BBC to YouTube, use .com or .co.uk domains. The .com addresses attract a premium, and no amount of new names will change that. To seasoned internet users, names like .biz or .info suggest a start-up site with no budget to buy a proper .com address.

For would-be domainers, the future might be bleak. As Google and other search engines become more sophisticated, the importance of domain names may decline further. Increasingly, the gateway to the internet is the simple Google search box, not the code-filled address bar.

The “semantic web”, where pages are intelligently linked together and information is offered to users before they have even searched for it, will accelerate the process. It may be that web addresses disappear from billboards just as quickly as they appeared.

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