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PARIS : Web regulators Thursday voted to open up the Internet's domain name system to create hundreds of new website addresses, such as ".paris" or ".Pepsi", in one of the biggest shake-ups in online history.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the overhaul, which has major implications for businesses and consumers worldwide, during its annual general meeting in Paris.
"This is a historic resolution. It is going to make a big difference to the way the Internet looks and works," ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush told a press conference.
Currently the world's 160 million web addresses end with one of some 250 top-level domain names: .country or .territory domains, and generic ones such as .com, .net and .org, as well as .gov and .Edu.
But ICANN was under pressure to find a solution for burgeoning demand, with the stock of available addresses set to run out by 2011.
Under the new system, the web's 1.3 billion users will be able from the third quarter of 2009 to buy generic top-level domains (gTLDs) based on common words, brands or company names, cities or proper names.
Paul Twomey, ICANN's chief executive, said the regulator needed three or four months to work out the details, and would start accepting applications in the second quarter of next year.
The web body also voted to allow domain names to be lodged in languages such as Arabic or Mandarin Chinese.
In theory, an infinite number of new generic domain names could be born, but in reality applicants will need the technical ability to run an Internet registry of millions of individual domain names -- and deep pockets.
Each new domain will have a substantial price tag, "in the low six-digits, US dollars", to allow the non-profit body to recover its 20-million-dollar development costs, Twomey said.
"We don't expect there to be thousands of applications. You are going to have to be a reasonably serious business or community of businesses," said Thrush.
But he said ICANN was "hoping for and expecting a broad range of applicants."
"We're expecting indigenous communities interested in protecting aspects of their language and culture. Or vanity domains: we may see .smith, for all the Smiths of the world to have a place."
Cities could also benefit from the liberalisation, with the German capital hoping for .berlin or New York for .nyc.
- AFP/il
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