Andrew McLaughlin
Chief Policy Officer, ICANN

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Let there be dots. let there be .bank, .sex and maybe even .sucks. For lo, earlier this year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced it would begin accepting proposals for new "top-level domains" to go with the ones we all know, like .com, .org and .net. The new names could cater to particular industries (such as banks) or interests (such as sex) — and, hopefully, cut down on the endless squabbles, bitter lawsuits and mad bidding wars that keep erupting over website names. ICANN, a private, nonprofit company, will announce the new domains by the end of 2000. But it won't be easy. Andrew McLaughlin, ICANN's chief policy officer, is bracing for a blizzard of proposals from companies as to what these new domains should be. Hypothetical possibilities include .fin for financial companies, .sucks for protest sites or .museum for, well, you know. McLaughlin and the eight other members of ICANN's staff will make recommendations to their board of directors, who will ultimately choose.

One of McLaughlin's chief concerns is to avoid a new avalanche of litigation. It's easy to imagine that, just as Amazon.com had to battle another company over its domain name, it might have to fight again for, say, amazon.books. How to avoid this is still not clear — perhaps, McLaughlin speculates, it might help to impose a waiting period on new site names, giving contenders a chance to iron out their differences before a site name is issued. Another way to avoid problems: keep the number of new domains to a minimum. Consequently, most experts don't expect ICANN to approve more than half a dozen or so. "This is a test go-around," McLaughlin says. But if all goes well, 2001 may see a multitude of dots sprouting on the Web like so many blooms.

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