Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
A top-level domain is the part of an Internet
address after the dot. The most common of what are
called generic top-level domains are dot-com,
dot-net and dot-org. There are twenty-two generic
top-level domain names currently available. But get
ready for many, many more.The international
organization that controls these names will begin
accepting applications for new ones in January. This
will open the door to dot-just-about-anything. Brad
White is with ICANN, the International Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers. He says: "What we're
talking about doing with the new generic top-level
domain program is blowing the lid off that ceiling
of twenty two. The interest is there to expand that.
We no longer have to keep this to twenty-two. It can
be almost any word combination. It can be in
non-Latin characters, which is extremely important
if you happen to speak Russian because of the
Cyrillic alphabet, or Arabic, or Chinese." ICANN
officials met in October in Dakar, Senegal. Brad
White says they discussed the new program for what
are known as gTLDs. "This marks one of the biggest
changes in the Internet's domain name system, the
addressing system of the Internet, that has ever
occurred. We want to make sure that the process of
getting these gTLDs into the Internet's root is
methodical, careful and thoughtful." Anyone can
apply, including businesses, governments and
individuals. The cost of a new name: one hundred
eighty-five thousand dollars. Mr. White says:
"That's the cost that we've determined that is
necessary to make sure that the applicant has the
technical savvy to run an Internet registry, that
there is no intellectual property or trademark
problems, so on and so forth. But that hundred and
eighty-five thousand is miniscule compared to the
cost of actually operating an Internet registry." In
Dakar, ICANN passed a resolution to consider
creating a support system to help rising economies
with limited financial resources. For example, ICANN
says Africa represented less than twelve percent of
Internet growth worldwide in the last ten years. But
Mr. White says that is slowly beginning to change.
ICANN will accept applications from January twelfth
to April twelfth. It could take up to a year for new
names to become active. ICANN says it will approve
no more than one thousand new generic top-level
domains each year. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
