Planners address web domain name crisis

Radical ways of increasing the supply of website names are being put forward at a high-level meeting of internet planners this week in Egypt.

Global demand for new web domain names - especially .com - is increasing rapidly. As a result, the main governing body for website names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), is desperately trying to work out how to broaden existing domain name conventions.

Icann's initiative comes hot on the heels of last week's proposal by the European Commission to use .eu, a new high-level domain name for European commercial companies.

The commission hopes the name will stimulate take-up of the internet and encourage cross-border ecommerce sites, particularly among Europe's small and medium-sized businesses.

Other ideas expressed at the Cairo conference are more eccentric. One is that companies should be able to label websites so they reflect their business sector - such as .bank, .cars, or .books.

Another suggests using industry codes - although that would make it hard to label companies such as Virgin, which has multiple corporate personalities. One proposal from Germany even suggested the use of numeric trademark codes such as .de35.