Internet addresses to move beyond .com, .org, .net and .edu

With the internet ready to take the first four of a new set of net-address suffixes, called generic top-level domains, or GTLDs, domain names would not be limited to .com, .org and others.

For starters there would be the Chinese word for game, the Arabic world for web and the Russian words for online and site.

"In addition to facilitating competition and innovation through the New gTLD Program, one of ICANN's key aims is to help create a globally inclusive Internet, regardless of language or region. For this reason, we elected to prioritise the processing of IDN applications and their delegation," Akram Atallah, ICANN's president of generic domains, said in a blog post.

The process which has extended over years was overseen by ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which pressed ahead in the face of mounting complaints from trademark holders worried about an explosion of new destinations where they must worry about trademark protection. Public.

According to ICANN, the new domains had been added to the root servers that held the master list of internet addresses, but were not yet live for real-world use.

The change would wait at least 30 days for a "sunrise period" during which trademark holders could register addresses using their own trademarks.

For example, General Motors might also want to register not only chevrolet.com, but also chevrolet.car, chevrolet.nyc, and chevrolet.eco.

GTLDs which are the root point for growing an internet name, until today numbered only 22 including .biz, .org and .com.

The first of over  a thousand new gTLD's went live this week with Melbourne-based internet infrastructure outfit ARI Registry planting one of the four on the net.

Acting as the tech provider to the Arabic dotShabaka Registry, ARI planted the Arabic script (.shabaka in English) gTLD on the internet.

The Australian quoted ARI CEO Adrian Kideris, as saying there were four names that went live overnight, all injected simultaneously. He added, it was hard to say which one of the four actually blinked first.

He added it was an internationalised domain name which was in Arabic script and that had never been made available before at gTLD level. He added, in dotcomland it had always been ASCII characters.
 
He added it was a red letter day for the internet.

He said it was about expansion, breaking the shackles of .com and .org, and secondly it was about internationalising the internet.

He said, the ability to interact with the internet had never been international and with the introduction of Cyrillic strings, Chinese strings and Arabic strings the start of some internationalization was coming through.