ICANN Announces New Domains

M A R I N A  D E L  R E Y, Calif., Nov. 17 -- An Internet oversight board gavethe Web a new batch of domain names Thursday, choosing .biz, .nameand five other suffixes to help ease the dot-com name crunch.

The decisions by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names andNumbers capped a half-decade of discussion about how to relieve thecrowded field of addresses ending in .com, which has some 20million registrations worldwide.

The new names are the first major additions since the system ofdomains, or Internet address suffixes, was developed in the 1980s.The new suffixes could appear in use by the middle of next year.

Accommodating GrowthICANN approved .info for general use, .biz for businesses, .namefor individuals, .pro for professionals, .museum for museums, .coopfor business cooperatives and .aero for the aviation industry.

“This is only an initial sampling,” ICANN chairwoman EstherDyson said. “The ones that were accepted … will provideadditional utility, but they are probably not the only ones thatwould qualify.”

There are already “regional” suffixes familiar to mostcomputer users, such as .edu and .gov, which are for educationalinstitutions and government agencies. But .com, .net and .orgcurrently are the only suffixes designated as available to anyoneworldwide.

The new suffixes are similar to adding area codes to thenational phone system to accommodate growth.

They could make more simple addresses available and Web siteseasier to find. A computer user, for example, could someday typeama.health to reach the American Medical Association Web siteinstead of www.ama-assn.org. The current name is so long becauseama.org belongs to the American Marketing Association.

Kids Rejected The new suffixes could also begin a new Internet land rush, withspeculators and trademark holders competing to claim the best namesfirst. ICANN must now negotiate contracts with companies or groupsthat made the winning proposals.

New suffixes have been under consideration since the mid-1990s,but there were disputes over how many, which ones and registration.ICANN was designated by the Commerce Department in 1998 as theoverseer of domain names and online addresses.