NEW
YORK (AP)—The organization behind a major expansion of Internet address
suffixes is offering full refunds to companies and organizations
affected by a weeks-long delay in taking proposals.
Each
application costs $185,000. Applicants had been allowed to withdraw
bids for a partial refund. Now, they can get all of their money back as
long as they pull their bids before a deadline that hasn’t yet been
determined.
Last
month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers abruptly
shut down a system for letting companies and organizations propose new
suffixes, after it discovered a software glitch that exposed some
private data. The data in some cases offered clues about which companies
were proposing what suffixes, which was supposed to be confidential.
Up
to 1,000 domain name suffixes—the “.com” part of an Internet
address—could be added each year in the most sweeping change to the
domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.
From
a technical standpoint, the names let Internet-connected computers know
where to send email and locate websites. But they’ve come to mean much
more.
The
idea behind the expansion is to let Las Vegas hotels, casinos and other
attractions congregate around “.Vegas,” or a company such as Canon Inc.
draw customers to “cameras.Canon” or “printers.Canon.” The new system
would also make Chinese, Japanese and Swahili versions of “.com”
possible.
Source: The Associated Press