Regulators may ease domain restrictions

PARIS, June 23 (UPI) -- Internet regulators meeting in France said they will vote this week on relaxing rules on the use of top level domain names such as ".com."

The BBC said the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been working for years on the changes, which would allow companies to turn their brands into domain names.

"Like the United States in the 19th century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have," ICANN's Paul Twomey told the BBC. "It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the Internet."

The proposed changes would allow individuals to use their own name or any other string of letters as their Internet address, as long as they can show a business plan and technical capability, the report said.