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Seven new top-level domain names agreed
Friday, November 17 2000
by Paul Drury


Seven new Internet domain addresses have been agreed by the Web's international
overseers, beginning the largest structural shake-up of the Net since the late
1980s.

The new suffixes are .info and .biz for general use, .pro for professionals,
.name for personal Web sites, .museum for museums, .aero for airline groups and
.coop for business cooperatives. They will become operational next spring at the
earliest.



The seven new addresses, officially called generic top-level domains or TLDs,
were selected by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
from nearly 50 applications submitted by businesses and other groups.  Rejected
were, among others, .web, .kids, .xxx, .union, .health, .travel and .geo.



The current suffixes, .com, .net and .org, will continue as will individual
country domain addresses such as .ie, currently being aggressively promoted by
Ireland's newly independent IE Domain Registry.



This broadening of the Web address bank has been under discussion for some time.
There are now more than 20 million .com domain names registered and, while .org
and .net were originally created to differentiate non-commercial Web sites, the
distinctions have largely been lost.



The approved new domain names are potentially worth millions to their promoters,
who will have the right to charge for registration. But they will have to invest
heavily in marketing and promotion before they start to see a profit.



Afilias, a consortium of 19 current domain registries including Register.com,
that proposed .info, expects to sign up 16 million new Web sites during its first
four years but says it will lose USD13 million.



And those projections were based on its first choice, .web, which ICANN rejected,
Afilias member Thomas Barrett told the New York Times. The .info suffix will be
even harder to sell, he claimed. The applicants have already paid USD50,000 each
to financially strapped ICANN to consider their proposals.



It has not yet been decided whether existing Web sites ending in the .com, .net
and  .org suffixes will automatically be given opportunities to register their
same addresses using the new suffixes.