Regulators of web give thumbs-up to new suffixes

THE RICH and vain may soon be able to grab their own address on the web to compete with .com or .ie.

At a meeting in Paris yesterday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) voted to liberalise its rules to open up the market for new web suffixes. Examples include .berlin or .paris, which are expected to be among the first to be sold.

While open to all comers from next April, the new top-level domains will not be cheap. They will have a minimum price of $100,000 (€63,500). Applicants will have to demonstrate their ability to run the necessary infrastucture to support their use and will also have to submit a business plan to Icann. Running costs are likely to exceed €1 million a year.

“Like the United States in the 19th century, we are in the process of opening up new land. And people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons,” said Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann. “It’s a massive increase in the real estate of the internet.”

At the meeting, the body that oversees web addresses agreed to allow domains in Chinese, Arabic and other scripts. In February, the Chinese government announced it had 221 million internet users – more than any other country, including the US.

Despite Mr Twomey’s upbeat comments, Icann seems to be hedging its bets on whether the move will be a success. Icann will need to make an investment of $10 million in infrastructure to support the new names – requiring it to sell just 100 at the lowest price to recoup its investment.

The addition of new top-level domains in the past has had mixed success. There are a total of 27 generic suffixes in use, in addition to country-specific ones such as .ie or .uk. In the last round of liberalisation .travel was introduced but it has not been a success and is losing large amounts of money. By contrast, the .cat address for Catalan websites introduced in 2005 has about 30,000 addresses.

There are also technical concerns about the addresses. “What happens to the domains if the registrar fails?” asked Michele Neylon of Irish firm Blacknight Solutions, in Paris for the meeting. “You have to be very careful when introducing something into the root of the internet.”

Irishman Dennis Jennings is one of the board members of Icann.