ICANN Approves New Top-Level
Domain Names

Are your routers ready to start sorting traffic bound for seven new top TLDs?

by Arthur Gordon of la.internet.com [November 17, 2000]

After four days of meetings in the Marina del Rey neighborhood of Los Angeles, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Board of Directors voted nearly unanimously to approve the applications of seven new top-level domain names, more commonly knows as TLDs.

The new suffixes will be:

• .aero - Sponsored by Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques.
• .biz - Sponsored by JVTeam.
• .coop - Sponsored by National Cooperative Business Association.
• .info - Sponsored by Afilias.
• .museum - Sponsored by Museum Domain Management Association.
• .name - Sponsored by Global Name Registry Limited.
• .pro - Sponsored by RegistryPro Ltd.

The board members voted on the collective final list after three straw votes had reduced the earlier list of 10 proposed TLDs that had been put into a virtual "basket," a concept familiar to online shoppers.

ICANN Director Linda Wilson had maintained an auxiliary basket of five proposals — .kids, .law, Name.Space, .union, and .web. But they did not reach the nearly unanimous consensus that the board had sought.

In fact, none of these auxiliary proposals had received even a simple majority of votes. Additionally, The board decided to withhold .web from consideration. One reason may have been that strings ending in .web are not protected by U.S. copyright law, according to ICANN Director Louis Touton, an authority on legal matters.

The board rejected some proposals due to their lack of pronounceability as a word, insufficient information on their applications, lack of relevant experience, or insufficient funding.

ICANN directors said some proposals had merit, but they wanted this expansion of TLDs to be a first step in increasing the number of string suffixes. Successful proposals met the board's desire for diversity of location, sponsoring company, and size of sponsoring company.

Vint Cerf frequently contributed his thoughts on technical limitations of some proposals. On a nontechnical matter, he stated the opinion that the board does not want to grant an application to a registrar for more than one string, since many applicants submitted proposals for five or more strings.

Before adjourning the meeting of the present board, outgoing Chairman Esther Dyson received a congratulatory speech from ICANN for her tireless efforts during the past four years. She said that she would both regret and not regret working on future ICANN business.

ICANN's next quarterly meeting with its newly installed board members will be March 10-13, 2001, in Melbourne, Australia.

— End

     

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	[July 19, 2000]	New TLDs Approved by ICANN But Doubts Remain