New domain names could come in mid-2008 - Yahoo! News

New domain names could come in mid-2008 - Yahoo! News: "New domain names could come in mid-2008 " By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer 47 minutes ago NEW YORK - New Internet addresses for general use could start appearing in the summer of 2008 under a timeline the Internet's key oversight agency announced Thursday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers invited public comment on procedures for creating new names, the first expansion for general use since 2000. Names added since then have been limited to specific regions or industries. "This is all about choice," ICANN Chief Executive Paul Twomey said in a statement. "We want the diversity of the world's people, geography and business to be able to be represented in the domain name system." Domain names are key for helping computers find Web sites and route e-mail. There are currently about 250 domain name suffixes, most of them for specific countries such as ".fr" for France. General-use names include ".com" and ".net." In 2000, two years after its designation by the U.S. government as the authority for overseeing Internet naming policies, ICANN approved seven new names, but only ".info" and ".biz" were truly for general use.