Domain names with endings like iwantbeer or the names of big corporations like Hitachi could start popping up on the internet soon after a groundbreaking decision yesterday that will allow addresses to end in almost any word in any language.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which governs the internet's naming system, approved its long-debated plan to increase the number of generic top-level domains - the words after the last dot - from 22 endings, including .com, .org and .net.
'The decision will usher in a new internet age,' Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of Icann's board of directors, said yesterday on its website. 'We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration.'
After the board's vote yesterday at a meeting in Singapore - with 13 for, one against and two abstaining - applicants can apply to Icann for almost any domain name endings that they want between January and April of next year, with a minimum fee of US$185,000 per application.
Manufacturers Hitachi and Canon have already announced plans for .hitachi and .canon, and bloggers have suggested names like .movie, whereto.go and iwant.beer.
Icann said the new endings would change the way people found information online and how businesses structured their web presence. It would also offer organisations the opportunity to market in new ways.
Joseph Ng Kee-yin, a professor at Baptist University's computer science department, said the opening up could allow companies and organisations to create more specific internet addresses that showed the characteristics of their websites. He believed there would be more industry-specific names such as .broadcast in future.