Unsanctioned Webs.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Brief Article

Critics have long charged the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the authority that assigns domain names, with artificially choking off the number of possible Web addresses. It's nice to have a site called reason.com, they suggest, but why not a reason.magazine, or a reason.foundation, or even (for our foes) a reason.sucks? Late last year, ICANN recommended that seven new top-level domains be adopted, including .aero for air transit sites and .coop for cooperatives. But why stop at seven? There's no good reason not to have 50 or 100 new domains: Surfing would be easier, with shorter addresses to remember; cybersquatting would be less of a problem, since it would be harder to buy up all the possible permutations of a person's or company's name; and domains themselves would be cheaper.

While ICANN dithers, some rival registries have been assigning new addresses of their own. The best-known are Image Online Design and Name.Space, both of which have been around for years. The former lets you register sites with the suffix .web. The latter has opened up hundreds of options, from .art to .zine. These exist outside the root server run by Network Solutions, the company with a monopoly on ICANN-approved addresses, so you have to reconfigure your computer to reach them. It's unclear how many pages exist only in these alternative online universes, and how many are merely staking their claims now, in hopes that ICANN will adopt more top-level domain names and let these alternative registries control the domains they pioneered.

Good luck. Before announcing the latest assortment of top-level domains, ICANN required organizations...