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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which opened its annual general meeting Monday in Paris, was due to vote on the new names later on this week.

"Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city or proper names," ICANN president Paul Twomey said.

At present "top-level domains" (TLD) are restricted to ones like .com, .org and .gov -- or country codes like .uk or .fr.
Under this new proposal, many more domains like .mac, .xxx or .abc could be approved, not to mention ones like .apple, .intel and .dell.
The report notes that any string of letters would be theoretically possible, but there would be an approval process in place to prevent any abuses of the system.
On top of that, domains in different character sets like Arabic, Hebrew and the various Asian languages would also be possible.