Checks will also be made in applications for the .pro domain name, limiting its availability to qualified professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants, although the nature of the checks is not yet known.
ICANN’s vice president Louis Touton was yesterday addressing a US congressional subcommittee and said that four of the seven new names should be available from late Summer.
The other new gTLDs are: .name, .museum, .aero, .coop and .info. The registry for each domain is being administered by a different company. The .biz domain will be administered by NeuStar Inc; Register.com will administer the .pro domain.
VeriSign, the US company that administers the .com registry, said this week that it will begin taking registrations for domain names in Arabic, Hebrew and Thai from early next month. Last year, VeriSign began taking registrations of names using Korean, Japanese and Chinese characters and in February opened the door to names using characters of around 70 other languages.