Times-Union.com

7 new dots to relieve dot-com deluge

To meet demands for Web site addresses, a host of new suffixes are set to debut starting next month

By MARK HELM, Washington bureau First published: Saturday, August 11, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Get ready to change your Internet address book.

Beginning next month new domain names -- those dot-something suffixes that are tacked onto the end of Web site names -- will start popping up on the Internet.

Computer experts say they hope the seven names -- .biz, .info, .coop, .aero, .museum, .pro and .name -- will create badly needed extra address space on the information highway.

The new names will join the familiar .com, along with .org for nonprofit organizations, .edu for educational institutions, .gov for governmental bodies, .mil for military and .net for computer system networks.

Web sites using .info suffixes will begin appearing online Sept. 19. The .biz names will be available Oct. 1. The other names all will come online over the next year.

"Without a doubt, more addresses are needed on the Internet to accommodate the thousands of businesses, nonprofit organizations and individuals who start Web sites each day,'' says Charles King, an analyst at Sageza Group, a Redwood City, Calif., Internet consulting company.

The current .com traffic jam can be traced to the Internet's beginnings.

In the early days -- the 1970s and 1980s -- educational institutions and nonprofit groups using the .edu and .org domain names dominated the World Wide Web, which was then used mostly by academics to share scholarly information. Few business executives even thought about the Internet, much less went to the effort of creating a Web site and registering it under their name.

As a result, address space using .com was looked at similarly to the way Americans regarded the frontier West in the early 1800s -- as a nearly unending territory that would never be filled. So when individuals, community groups, clubs and others began registering Web sites, they all were given .com endings.

"Everyone thought the .com address space would never run out; so it became a catch-all for anyone or any group registering a Web site,'' King says.

But like the American West, .com space wasn't unending.

A 1999 study by the technology magazine Wired.com found that there were only 1,760 English words left to be claimed as an address under the domain name .com.

At that time companies and individuals trying to register their Web sites were being forced to come up with more and more complicated address names to avoid duplicating already existing Web sites.

So Internet experts decided to add domain names that better described the different types of Web sites.

A Los Angeles group called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was charged with working out the expansion. ICANN, an international nonprofit organization, had been officially created in 1998 when the U.S. government was trying to get out of the business of registering Web sites. The government had gotten involved because the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had funded the research that helped create the first computer networks in 1969. Eventually those networks grew and combined into the Internet.

Currently, Network Solutions, a Sterling, Va.-based company, oversees all Web-site registrations with the old domain names, charging about $75 each.

ICANN settled on seven new domain names to help sort out Web sites on the Internet:

.biz for business-related Web sites;

.aero for the air-transport industry;

.coop for nonprofit cooperatives, such as credit unions;

.museum for museums;

.name for Web site registration by individuals;

.pro for professionals such as accountants, lawyers and physicians, and

.info for Web sites that don't fall under any existing categories.

Before overseeing the registration of Web sites under the new domain names, ICANN needed to figure out who would get the most sought-after addresses.

It wanted to avoid the problem of "cybersquatting'' in which people register names such as coke.com or ford.com with the hope of reselling the rights to companies later.

In 1999, the financial services company Morgan Stanley Dean Witter sued a 17-year-old and his father for the rights to www.msdwonline.com, which the two had purchased and tried to sell to Morgan Stanley for $75,000. Last year Morgan Stanley, which initially offered to buy the name for $10,000, won the case in court and paid the pair nothing.

ICANN President Stuart Lynn said that in the early days of name registration, "it was first come, first serve, and you didn't need to show any reason why John Doe should be allowed to register the Web address pepsi.com.''

To prevent this practice from recurring, ICANN required the firms it hired to sell registrations under the new domain names to charge a small fee, usually around $2, to keep people from registering thousands of names at a time. ICANN also demanded that its firms determine whether individuals and companies registering for a particular name have a rightful claim to that address.

"Everyone wanted to make sure that no one could take advantage of the system,'' says Doug Armentrout, president of NeuLevel, the Sterling, Va., company that won the right to sell registrations under .biz.

Armentrout says companies holding trademarks on particular names receive first crack at registering that name under .biz. In situations where two or more companies have an equally valid claim to the same name, the winner is picked at random.

-- Anonymous, August 11, 2001