ICANN presses on with new top level domains

INTERNET NAMING ORGANISATION ICANN has decided to press ahead with plans to open up a range of brand name top level domain suffixes, despite having some weighty opposition.

The decision was announced by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) president and CEO Rod Beckstrom, who said that after some chin stroking the organisation is ready to begin receiving applications for new global top level domain names (GTLDs) on 12 January.

The decision - which will enable top level domains like .coke or .pepsi, for example - follows some pre-emptive complaining from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which said that any new suffixes would be trouble.

"A rapid, exponential expansion of gTLDs has the potential to magnify both the abuse of the domain name system and the corresponding challenges we encounter in tracking down Internet fraudsters," warned the FTC in December.

"In particular, the proliferation of existing scams, such as phishing, is likely to become a serious challenge given the infinite opportunities that scam artists will now have at their fingertips."

According to Beckstrom ICANN completed its own investigations and decided that it was able to manage the launch of the domains and could see no reason not to stick to its original timeline, which it has done.

Top level domain names have already seen some scandal in recent months thanks to the launch of the triple X top level domain, which is intended to segregate adult entertainment web sites from the rest of the internet. µ