Advertisers Seek Answers To Glitch For New Internet Name System

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for managing the address system on the Internet, has run into a glitch, confirming advertisers' worst fears -- that adding hundreds of new top-level domains to the Internet too quickly is foolhardy.

ICANN was forced April 12 to pull offline its system for accepting applications from companies for new TLDs (dot-apple, dot-coke, dot-bank) after the system leaked to some applicants the file names and user names of other applicants. As a result, ICANN also had to postpone a planned April 30 announcement of which companies have applied for new TLDs. That's about all anyone knows about the application process that opened Jan. 12 under protest from the advertising community, worried about defensive registrations to protect their brands on the Internet. Seeking answers, advertisers called on ICANN's president and CEO Rod Beckstrom to hire a neutral, third-party expert to investigate.