(CNN) — A group charged with overseeing the development of the Internet voted Thursday to relax the rules on Web site naming conventions — potentially triggering a virtual domain name gold rush to rival the dotcom boom of the late 1990s.

Paul Twomey is president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

At a meeting in Paris Thursday, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — also known by its acronym ICANN — unanimously approved key proposals to allow domain names using any combination of letters and numbers, including non-Latin characters, The Associated Press reported.

The decision could spell the end for traditional Web addresses ending .com and .org and country names like .jp or .fr with Web sites able to use easier-to-remember suffixes such as .hotel or .sex.

Just the thought of .sex has bloggers predicting an auction frenzy, as almost any word in any language could become a domain name extension.

“You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, probably be dot-sex,” said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.

“All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already,” Glick said.

ICANN was established as a non-profit organization in 1998 in order to regulate the Internet. One of its key roles has been maintaining the integrity of the Web’s domain name system. It has turned down requests for .xxx, which would be used by adult sites, over fear of seeming to give approval of pornography sites.

But the more generic .hotel or .flight could set off a bidding war similar to when .tv was put up for sale by the Pacific island of Tuvalu.

Published from http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/26/domain.names/index.htm

Brad Bowman

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under Domain Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.