By Maija Palmer

Businesses are braced for a big jump in costs to protect their online trademarks after the body regulating internet domain names paved the way for thousands of new addresses.

For about $500,000 (?300,00), companies and community groups will be able to create customised internet domain names, such as .apple or .hitachi, rather than using the existing suffixes such as .com and .net.

The actual cost for popular domain names contested by several parties, however, is likely to multiply, with lawyers predicting that the new addresses will trigger big legal battles.

Companies are also concerned that the fresh domains will lead to increased ?cybersquatting?, where trademark names are taken by internet opportunists. The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), is the biggest shake-up of the internet?s domain name system since the creation of the .com suffix 26 years ago.

Companies including Ikea, Swedish furniture store, and Motorola, mobile phone company, are concerned about the new name system, saying it will bring little benefit but mean a great deal of increased cost and work for companies.

?We don?t want anyone else to get .ikea,? said Gabrielle Olsson Skalin, Ikea?s general counsel, at an industry conference in Stockholm this month. ?But from a marketing perspective we don?t see benefit – just increased costs and also more work to be done in-house.?

It will cost $185,000 simply to apply for a top-level domain, regardless of success, and companies will need to hire experts to guide them through a complicated application process and to run the top-level domain once it has been awarded. Fees to Icann will be $25,000 a year.

On top of this, companies face legal and consultancy fees along with the cost of running the domain name. This would bring the total cost to about $500,000 if the name is uncontested.

The ownership of popular domain names will go to the highest bidder in an auction process, meaning that some companies will face costs running to millions of dollars to secure a particular name, said Anthony Van Couvering, chief executive of Top Level Domain Holdings.

?The Financial Times Limited 2011