 This is the VOA Special English Technology Report. A top-level domain is the part of an internet address after the dot. The most common of what are called generic top-level domains are .com, .net, and .org. There are 22 generic top-level domain names currently available. Don't get ready for many, many more. The international organization that controls these names will begin accepting applications for new ones in January. This will open the door to .just about anything. Brad White is with ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He says, what we're talking about doing with the new generic top-level domain program is blowing the lid off that ceiling of 22. The interest is there to expand that. We no longer have to keep this to 22. It can be almost any word combination. It can be in non-Latin characters, which is extremely important if you happen to speak Russian because of the Cyrillic alphabet, or Arabic, or Chinese. ICANN officials met in October in Dakar, Senegal. Brad White says they discussed the new program for what are known as GTLDs. This marks one of the biggest changes in the Internet's domain name system, the addressing system of the Internet that has ever occurred. We want to make sure that the process of getting these GTLDs into the Internet's route is methodical, careful, and thoughtful. ICANN can apply, including businesses, governments, and individuals. The cost of a new name, $185,000. Mr. White says that's the cost that we've determined that is necessary to make sure that the applicant has the technical savvy to run an Internet registry that there is no intellectual property or trademark problems, so on and so forth. But that $185,000 is minuscule compared to the cost of actually operating an Internet registry. In Dakar, ICANN passed a resolution to consider creating a support system to help rising economies with limited financial resources. For example, ICANN says Africa represented less than 12% of Internet growth worldwide in the last 10 years. But Mr. White says that is slowly beginning to change. ICANN will accept applications from January 12th to April 12th. It could take up to a year for new names to become active. ICANN says it will approve no more than 1,000 new generic top-level domains each year. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.