Keller says that the Internet Ad-Hoc Coalition [IAHC]--a new organization made up of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Association--has proposed a competitive international process for domain registration and an additional seven new TLDs.
Among the new TLDs proposed under the plan, .firm, .store, .web and .arts would open new categories for domains and would alleviate some of the competition for .com domains.
The IAHC proposal, based on "a traditional set of institutions," does not satisfy some members of the Internet community, who have called for more decentralized control of the domain name system in keeping with the Internet's spirit of individualism, Keller says.
"The whole history of the Internet is based on the voluntary cooperation in a set of norms for how you behave on the Internet with regard to technologies," Keller says.
But he adds that individual registration of domain names would be chaotic.
"Time has a way of resolving things," Battista told Congress, and, indeed, a wait-and-see attitude seems to be the dominant reaction of observers of the Internet's name game.