Fight the .xxx!

The internet will change beyond recognition by as early as next year in what is being billed as one of the most radical shake-ups over how net addresses work, if a vote to relax domain name rules is approved tomorrow.


After three years of negotiations the organisation that regulates the World Wide Web will decide during a meeting in Paris tomorrow afternoon whether it should open up the strict rules governing top-level domains, the technical term for the suffixes that appear at the end of internet addresses such as ?.org? or ?.com?.

In a separate, but equally significant move for the developing world, the regulators will also begin allowing new scripts into a cyber-world that, until now, has been dominated by the Roman alphabet.

Although web pages support non-Roman scripts there are currently no provisions to include them in the address system that navigates users to a specific page. Critics say that stops billions of people in the developing world from accessing the internet because they can only read their indigenous script.

If the provisions are approved the move could also pave the way for companies to buy up the right to use their own name as a suffix by the middle on 2009. Microsoft.com, for instance, could change its address to Microsoft.microsoft while individuals would be able to subscribe to any number of terms to use in their own internet addresses.

The pornography industry, which accounts for approximately 12 per cent of all internet content, is also hoping to be allowed to use .xxx as a domain name. It argues that would make it easier for customers to find their sites, while enabling those who do not wish to view porn a greater capacity to block it.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the not-for-profit organisation that has regulated domain names since 1998, has spent over £10m trying to find a way to expand the accessibility of the net after countries in developing world complained it was overly dominated by developed nations.

In order to recoup the cost of the negotiations, sources say companies will be expected to pay out a ?six figure sum? to register their own name.

There will also be discussions to include a fast-track system for some of the most commonly used scripts such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cyrillic.

Emily Taylor, a delegate attending the conference in Paris on behalf of Nominet, one of the world?s largest internet registries, said including non-Roman scripts could be a major turning point in the history of the internet. ?There are currently 1.5 billion people using the internet which means there are a good 4.5 billion people not doing so,? she said. ?These people are not from Europe or America, most of them will be from developing world nations where the Roman script is meaningless.?

Some have expressed fears that the creation of new suffixes could confuse internet users but others believe that the industry will regulate itself.

?The .com suffix is so well established I don?t think that many companies will want to replace it,? said Duncan Bell, managing editor of T3 technology magazine. ?Microsoft.microsoft is not only harder to remember, it takes longer to type.?