ICANN Selects Seven New Domain Names
by Mary Mosquera, TechWeb News

The group responsible for maintaining the Internet is letting .biz and .name into the expanding family of Internet domain names. But no .kids are allowed.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, voted Thursday to add seven new generic domain names to stoke competition and expand online addresses.

ICANN chose .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum to join the decade-old .com, .net, and .org as the generic top-level domains Ñ or gTLDs - on the root server, the brain of the Internet address system.

More domain names will likely unclog the bottleneck from the shortage of endings and the inability to register short and simple Web addresses. A string of new suffixes is expected to spark a torrent of additional addresses and encourage e-commerce opportunities.

"The ICANN board wisely recognized that consumers worldwide want more choice, more competition and less confusion on the Internet," said Paul Hazen, CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association.

His association, which submitted the .coop domain name, represents 750,000 co-ops around the world. Board members of the organization to which the federal government transferred technical administration of the Internet in 1998 spent the final day of their meeting in Marina del Rey, Calif., discussing and weeding out names they felt were unsatisfactory.

ÒWe are looking for a limited number of the very best,Ó said board member and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

One of the proposed suffixes that was rejected was .kids. In discussions about that name, ICANN Board President Mike Roberts said Internet users might infer more from the top-level domain names they choose than the organization can impart.

ÒI think weÕre going to have TLDs that become road maps to content. And we are in the position that we are going to create those TLDs and that gives me great pause,Ó Roberts said.

The domain names fall into three categories:

• General purpose – .biz, .info
• Personal – .name
• Restricted use by community – .museum, .aero, .coop, and .pro.

Operators of the databases for the new domain names reflect diversity in geography and size.

Affilias, a consortium of 19 ICANN-accredited registrars Ñ including the original and dominant domain-name seller, Network Solutions Inc., that is now a VeriSign Inc. company Ñ has member companies from around the globe. That consortium will operate the .info registry.

ICANN said stability of the Internet was paramount in its domain name guidelines.

The likely onslaught of Internet users registering addresses with the new domain names demanded that groups operating the database have the technical and financial resources and detailed business plans to assure proper management, ICANN said.

A failure could have major commercial consequences and damage confidence in the Internet, the group said.