An ICANN official has said that applications for .biz domain names,
one of seven new generic top level domains (gTLDs) to be introduced
later this year, will be checked against a database of trade marks
to avoid infringement and cybersquatting.
Checks will also be made in applications for the .pro domain
name, limiting its availability to qualified professionals such as
doctors, lawyers and accountants, although the nature of the checks
is not yet known.
ICANN’s vice president Louis Touton was yesterday addressing a
US congressional subcommittee and said that four of the seven new
names should be available from late Summer.
The other new gTLDs are: .name, .museum, .aero, .coop and .info.
The registry for each domain is being administered by a different
company. The .biz domain will be administered by NeuStar Inc;
Register.com will administer the .pro domain.
VeriSign, the US company that administers the .com registry,
said this week that it will begin taking registrations for domain
names in Arabic, Hebrew and Thai from early next month. Last year,
VeriSign began taking registrations of names using Korean, Japanese
and Chinese characters and in February opened the door to names
using characters of around 70 other languages.
