A group charged with overseeing the development of the Internet voted Thursday to relax the rules on Web site naming conventions — potentially triggering a virtual domain name gold rush to rival the dotcom boom of the late 1990s.
At a meeting in Paris Thursday, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — also known via its acronym ICANN — unanimously approved key proposals to allow domain names using any combination of letters and numbers, including non-Latin characters.
The decision could spell the wind-up for traditional Web addresses ending .com and .org and wilderness names like .jp or .fr with Web sites expert to use easier-to-remember suffixes such as .hotel, .fishing or .sex.
There have been numerous requests for new top with domains such as .kids, .workshop and .nyc. Last year, ICANN voted to not allow .xxx with its pornography-related overtones.
ICANN has taken years to decide on relaxing the domain rules in order "to corn the security, stability, and global interoperability of the Internet" states the ICANN web site.
In the past, ICANN merely approved domain names considered as adding value. Now it says the objective is to quickly approve nearly every domain name submitted unless there is a dispute over the name.
To avoid cyber-squatting, ICANN says those who directory a new extension will have in the offing to prove they have a viable reason for it, and trademark names will not be auctioned.
Still, a bidding frenzy is expected for some of the more obvious extensions in what will become the biggest expansion of the Internet in decades.
Just the thought of .sex has bloggers predicting an auction frenzy, as almost any word in any language could become a domain name widening.
"You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, to all intents be dot-sex," said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.
"All the suggestive words and meaningful names in the English diction have been bought up already," Glick said.
From: rss.cnn.com
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