Representatives from companies like New.net and ICM Registry, which have blamed ICANN for not opening up the Internet's naming structure at rapid speed, asked for more general suffixes alongside the familiar "dot-org," "dot-com," and "dot-net."

"ICANN takes forever to do things and they're not responsive to the market," Brad Copeland, a spokesman at Pasadena, California-based New.net told NewsFactor Network.

ICANN was formed in 1998 by the U.S. government as a non-profit, independent corporation to oversee the Internet's addressing system. Even ICANN has admitted that this year's introduction of seven new domain names is merely a stepping-stone to more domain names.

ICANN officials and its partners argue that it is pursuing a reasonable timetable for offering more Internet suffixes. "You have to have some structure to how you operate this," Douglas Armentrout, CEO at Sterling, Virginia-based NeuLevel Inc. told NewsFactor.

NeuLevel is one of several firms given the go-ahead to register companies for two new global domain names, "dot-biz" and "dot-info."

Take Five

Even some ICANN directors believe the timetable to open up the other five approved domain names should be speeded up. But officials of an ICANN top level domain (TDL) task force argued against it, Armentrout said.

"It doesn't make sense to open up these other domains until we see what happens with the two new domains," he said. The "dot-biz" and "dot-info" domains are expected to begin operation sometime this fall, he added.

Roots Showing

New domain names that are not authorized by ICANN are called "alternate roots," because they are not authorized and cannot be reached through ICANN's Internet traffic root servers around the globe. To view Web pages with an alternate root, users need special browsers on their computers or be using an Internet service provider that has an agreement with alternate root providers.

Even without an agreement with ICANN, New.net has been convincing some high-powered Internet service providers, such as EarthLink and Exite@home, to offer users automatic access to its alternative TLDs. "Alternative roots are not as scary as ICANN would have you believe," says New.net's Copeland.

New.net has introduced 20 new top-level domain names not authorized by ICANN, such as "dot-car," "dot-kids" and the inevitable "dot-xxx." The effect is that EarthLink users, for example, can readily access the www.toys.shop site, while AOL or MSN users cannot. New.net also has a deal with several software download sites to push free software that will automatically allow browsers to recognize the new TLDs.

But New.net is just one of many organizations that bypass ICANN's name registry. Many are in countries using non-alphabetic scripts that have not been included in the ICANN alphabetic registry.

While new domain names may not be causing chaos for Internet providers, they likely to provide some problems for users.

"What happens when we have coke.com and coke.biz and they're awarded to two different companies? We don't know that yet," Patrick Dryden, an analyst with Illuminata, in Nashua, New Hampshire, told NewsFactor.

Other ICANN .biz

Domain name issues may have been cause for the most vocal challenges to ICANN at the meeting, but that was not the only issue. Other countries are increasingly fed up with the organization's perceived exclusive policies, which seem more geared toward issues of interest to the U.S. than to the rest of the world.

"Many outside the U.S. think ICANN is a complete puppet of the U.S. government, and resent the U.S. thinking it can control the Internet," New.net's Copeland told NewsFactor.