Five organisations, including one company each from France and Australia, have been authorised to assign Internet domain names and addresses in a first step to ending the US government monopoly of the Internet registry. France Telecom and Australia's Melbourne IT will be among those participating in a two-month test of the domain name management system, which assigns names ending in .com, .net and .org, for example.

Since 1993 domain name registrations have been handled by Network Solutions under an exclusive agreement with the US government.