Who knows, but we do know that 1,268 entities are interested enough to ante up $5,000 to register for the application process, according to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom. And while registration doesn’t guarantee an application will be filed or approved, it does grant each registrant the opportunity to apply for up to 50 TLDs.

In other words, 1,268 TLD applications is a pretty safe bet. Certainly that’s Beckstrom’s view. “It’s unlikely to be lower than that number,” he said.

But we won’t know for sure until later this month. Thanks to a software glitch that allowed some applicants to see user or file names of others, ICANN was forced to take the application system offline on April 12, and it has yet to reopen it. But it plans to do so soon. Between now and May 8, the group will notify any applicants affected by the glitch, and some time after that process has been completed it will reopen the application system for an additional five days to ensure that anyone who wants to pony up $185,000 to grab a vanity domain has the opportunity to do so.

The Internet’s governing body said Thursday that a technical issue with its top-level domain (TLD) application system, or TAS, has forced it to extend the deadline for submitting applications for new vanity domain names.

“Recently, we received a report of unusual behavior with the operation of the TAS system,” the agency said in a brief statement. “ICANN is taking the most conservative approach possible to protect all applicants and allow adequate time to resolve the issue.”

I’m told “unusual behavior” is not a euphemism for “attack,” but for some sort of system glitch.

Anyway, as a result, ICANN has extended the application deadline until April 20. Which means the 839 companies that are paying $185,000 a pop to submit vanity domains for the organization’s review have a bit longer to do so. ICANN is expected to publish details of these applications on April 30.

Update: And, indeed, it was a system glitch, one that allowed a limited number of users to view each other’s details.

That’s when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — the organization charged with managing the Internet’s domain name system — will begin accepting applications for new top-level domains (TLDs), a controversial decision that could create thousands of new vanity Internet suffixes. Today we have .com, .net, .org and 19 others. By year’s end, we’ll have many, many more — everything from brand names to services. Domain registrar Verisign estimates there will be up to 1,500 applications for new TLDs (think .sex, .NYC, .deloitte, etc.).

And ICANN is charging a $185,000 fee for every one. Which is great for ICANN, but not so great for companies worried about protecting their brands online and for consumers who might be confused by the vast clutter of new vanity domains. Coca-Cola, General Electric and 50-some other corporations have already stepped forward to oppose the program. But ICANN doesn’t appear to be listening.

Announcing the plan last summer, ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said it would open up the Internet’s addressing system “to the limitless possibilities of human imagination and creativity.”

But as I wrote at the time, by “limitless possibilities of human imagination and creativity,” he surely meant corporate imagination and creativity. Because that’s who’s being targeted here: Entities with the money to blow on $185,000 TLD application fees and a desire to promote themselves. This is going to be a massive brand-identity landgrab and one that’s unlikely to do much good for consumers, but plenty for ICANN and its coffers.

“This may be the dawn of a new age of online innovation in the domain name space. … The Internet’s addressing system has just been opened up to the limitless possibilities of human imagination and creativity,” ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said during a press briefing this morning.

But by “limitless possibilities of human imagination and creativity,” he really meant corporate imagination and creativity. Because that’s who’s being targeted here: Entities with the money to blow on $185,000 TLD application fees and a desire to promote themselves. This is going to be a massive brand-identity landgrab and one that’s unlikely to do much good for consumers, but plenty for ICANN and its coffers.

Last night, Bill Clinton–arguably the first Internet President–got a little nostalgic.

“We are actually here today because the people sitting in your seats 20 years ago imagined a different world, though they didn’t know exactly how it would come out,” he said in a keynote speech for the 40th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. “They just knew that a networked world would probably work better than a bureaucratic one.”

Yes, indeed, the world has come a long way from when Clinton was in office.

In fact, Clinton noted that to the 800 attendees last night–correctly calling himself “the president at the dawn of the Internet age”–that there were only 50 Web sites in 1993 when he was inaugurated, and 36 million when his term was up in 2001.

Clinton’s speech, a paid appearance, touched on his history with ICANN, as well as the intersection of the Internet, geopolitics, poverty, the global distribution of wealth and infrastructure.

ICANN is the multinational, non-governmental organization that researches, debates and enforces decisions that affect how traffic gets sent around the pipes of the Internet.

It decides, for instance, that Libyan domain names end in .ly.

Clinton’s focus last night was urging the international crowd to try to use technology and their positions around it to build physical and financial infrastructure systems for poorer nations.

He called for a renewed focus on technology-sector job growth and touched the geopolitical implications of free access to the Internet.

Invoking the recent revolution in Egypt, he said that ICANN needed to ensure universal access to a free Internet and the continued vibrancy of the Web.

“That’s why it’s important that you want the Internet to stay forever young,” said Clinton. “One hundred years from now, you want somebody in some godforsaken place that’s been beat down to be able to do what the kids in Cairo did.”

At the conclusion of the address, Clinton sat on stage with ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstorm and answered pre-selected questions.

The former President mostly stayed above the fray of the major debates surrounding this ICANN meeting, only peripherally mentioning the next day’s headline issue–the possible adoption of the .xxx top level domain.

That issue has seethed online for several years, and was supposed to come to a head Thursday. Several attendees related that a troupe of porn stars were expected at the following day’s meetings to protest the adoption of the .xxx domain for adult sites on the Web, as a modern day scarlet letter.

President Clinton’s most direct response was related to sales tax being levied on online purchases. It was his policy preference at the beginning of the e-commerce era to keep sales tax out of online transactions, so that those companies could have the chance to grow, he explained. He said that e-commerce didn’t seem to need the help anymore, and Amazon’s complaints about recent changes sounded like “a high class problem.”

ICANN 40 wraps up Friday, but won’t conclude before addressing other key topics, such as solving the global shortage of IP addresses–the unique numbers that identify every Internet-connected device–and aiding the proliferation of the next generation of online security protocols.

Adding more numbers to the list of IPs, or verifying a site’s identity, doesn’t sound complex. But, on the global scale, even simple changes require massive coordination.

Another issue: Lack of international enforcement could create a haven for online fraud in countries that can least afford it.

It was on this point that the former President’s speech and ICANN’s actual agenda converged.

“We need to ask ourselves if we are forming a more perfect union across the globe,” he said, urging those in the room not to get mired in small disagreements.

His advice: Focus on the larger mission of ensuring that the benefits of Internet access will be distributed equally, worldwide and beyond the foreseeable future.

“You have to be vigilant, because at some point all institutions are led by people more interested in maintaining the present than creating the future,” he said.

Word, Bill.

Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said at a U.N. sponsored Internet conference that his government had filed an application to register the domain “.masr”–or “.Egypt”–written entirely in Arabic, according to the Associated Press. ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said so far six countries submitted applications for domains in three languages, AP reports.

Not everyone thinks the groundbreaking move deserves fanfare–Reporters Without Borders said it finds it “surprising and disturbing” that Egypt is playing host to the Internet Governance Forum. “It is astonishing that a government that is openly hostile to Internet users is assigned the organisation of an international meeting on the Internet’s future,” the advocacy group said in a statement.

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Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau hurled the insult on an email list discussion after learning that ICANN had a travel budget of more than $12 million.

The organization convenes three international meetings a year to discuss Internet domain name issues, in places such as San Juan, Sao Paulo, Marrakech and Wellington.

Thibodeau suggests that ICANN’s recent decision to relax top-line domain-naming rules and allow businesses to purchase their own is a ploy to rake in more money for travel to exotic locales.

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Right time, indeed.

Domain registrar VeriSign’s (VRSN) latest report on the state of the industry shows that while more than 10.1 million new Web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter, this was a 17 percent drop from the period a year earlier.

The report, which drew from data provided by VeriSign, domain-data provider ZookNIC and the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, also showed a yearlong decline: New domain registrations averaged 11.9 million in 2008, compared with 12.2 million in 2007.

The slowdown in new URLs is clearly a reflection of the recession’s impact, says VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin. “Any type of broader economic weakness is going to affect” that, he said, and it’s something the industry saw in the early part of the decade as well.

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So 12 years from now our work lives will be our lives entire?

That’s an unsettling thought. But if we’re always connected, always on the grid, then what’s to stop it from coming to pass? What’s to stop “the expansion of the work to encompass all time and all space,” as Nick Carr described it in his comments to Pew researchers. A reassertion of the same boundaries we’re seeing erased, I imagine. Otherwise we may have this to look forward to…

Said Benjamin Ben-Baruch, senior market intelligence consultant and applied sociologist for Aquent: “In 2020…a myth will develop that outside of formally scheduled activities, work and play can be seamlessly integrated in most of these workers’ lives. Employers will attempt to convince us that this is a net positive for people because we will be able to blend personal/professional duties…. However the reality will be quite different. Because we can be surveilled whenever we are ‘connected’ and especially because we can be surveilled whenever we are connected using our employer-provided devices, we can and will be controlled. Our employers will gain even more control over work-time discipline and over our lives and will be able to force even more productive working hours from us. Our lives will in fact be increasingly controlled by those who provide us with the devices that will have become increasingly necessary for us in both our work and personal lives as well as those who own and control the networks and network sites that we use and visit. Some companies will try to distinguish themselves as companies that do not actually use their power to watch and control us–but most companies will do the ‘fiscally responsible’ thing of using available technology to assert control.”