Web addresses to get more leeway

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The Internet's key oversight agency is considering the first sweeping changes in the network's addressing system since its creation 25 years ago.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, closing weeklong meetings in Paris, was scheduled on Thursday to consider proposals for streamlining new domain name suffixes.

The new guidelines could lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Internet addresses to join ".com," including ".lat" for Latin America and a Bulgarian moniker in the Cyrillic script. New names, however, won't start appearing for at least several months, and ICANN won't be deciding on specific ones quite yet.

Domain names are key for helping computers find Web sites and route e-mail, and adding new suffixes can make it easier for Web sites to promote easy-to-remember names given that the best ones have mostly been claimed already under ".com."

One proposal under consideration by ICANN would permit addresses entirely in non-English characters for the first time. Specific countries would be put on a "fast track" to receive the equivalent of their two-letter country code, such as Bulgaria's ".bg," in a native language.

Demand for such names has been increasing around the world as Internet usage expands to people who cannot speak English or easily type English characters. Addresses partly in foreign languages are sometimes possible today, but the suffix has been limited to 37 characters: a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen.