ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, approved a proposal to create an unlimited number of top-level domains which are the suffixes after the last dot of Web addresses. Under the proposal, organizations will be able to apply for any top-level domain. The registration will come at a steep cost: somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000. However, the benefits could be much higher.

Another decision was approved by ICANN, regarding the usage of Web addresses that use non-Latin characters (no, they're not non-English, because there is no such thing as English characters). Both decisions were taken at a meeting in Paris.

As expected, ICANN will request that those who apply for a top level domain prove they have a viable reason to operate it. Also, trademarks will be excluded. Currently, top-level domains (TLDs) are limited to country suffixes, such as .ca (Canada) or .uk, as well as specific to commerce, .com, and to other types of organizations, such as .net, .biz, .info or .org.

ICANN started live testing of Internationalized Domain Names in 11 languages, Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil in October last year. The way IDN works is it actually converts the non-ASCII characters to ASCII-form, in order to preserve compatibility with the existing DNS and name resolver infrastructure.

The Generic Names Supporting Organization, as the ICANN’s committee is called, has voted 17 to 7 last November against a proposal that would have allowed the so called “natural persons”, that is the people who register domain names for purposes other than conducting businesses over the Internet, to list the contact information of designed third parties (rather than their own) in the ICANN’s WHOIS database.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was created in 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. Government by other organizations such as IANA. ICANN essentially manages domain names and IP addresses and establishes Internet policies, among other tasks.