Web name group to meet in Japan

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers meets this week in Yokohama. The group's biggest challenge will be to keep factions with opposing goals happy as it seeks to expand the Web's addressing system. Despite pressures to open up available domain names, the group is likely, according to one source, to approve only a few new suffixes such as .museum, .protest and perhaps .movie as well as either .sex or .xxx. The new suffixes would be the first added since the Net went commercial and is seen as a test of ICANN's ability to institutionalize a system that used to be run by Internet pioneer Jon Postel, whose organizational methodology was, reportedly, a list of names and numbers written on a piece of paper.

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