A new way of looking at the internet

The internet will change beyond recognition by as early as next year if a vote to relax domain name rules is approved today.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which regulates the World Wide Web, will decide at a meeting in Paris whether it should open up the rules governing top-level domains, the technical term for internet addresses' suffixes, such as ".org" and ".com".

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

Although web pages support non-Roman scripts, there are currently no provisions to incorporate them into the address system that navigates users to specific web pages.

Critics say that this stops billions of people from accessing the internet.

If the plans are approved they could also pave the way for companies to use their own names as suffixes by the middle of 2009, meaning that Microsoft.com, for instance, could become Microsoft.microsoft.

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