By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Nov 18 2000 (IPS)

The World Health Organisation (WHO) expressed displeasure Friday with the rejection of its bid to create an Internet domain known as “.health,” the United Nations agency’s attempt to ensure the quality of medical information on the web.

WHO officials said they were “extremely disappointed” with the decision taken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the panel that co-ordinates the specific functions of the domain name system.

ICANN, at a meeting this week in the US city of Marina del Rey, California, gave preliminary approval to seven new domain extensions.

The finalists are .biz (business), .info (information), .name (family names), .pro (professionals), .museum, .aero (travel) and .coop (co-operatives).

The WHO declared it is “eagerly awaiting the rationale of this decision” by ICANN, of which the health agency learned via news reports.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said that once the reasons are known, “we will begin immediately to explore channels for recourse.”

“WHO feels that the quality and standard of health information on the Internet, and the guarantees that this can give to ‘consumers,’ can only benefit from a ‘.health’ TLD (top-level domain),” Hartl said.

The UN agency proposed establishing the “.health” domain with the idea of collecting reliable information from responsible sources in the world of health, including researchers, professionals, the pharmaceutical industry and non-governmental organisations.

ICANN, a private non-profit organisation, received 44 proposals for new TLD names.

The panel will negotiate with the finalists in the coming weeks to determine operating procedures and will make a final announcement before Dec 31 about which new names are to be implemented.

The rapid growth of the Internet is underscored by the fact that there are currently some 25 million web addresses with generic suffixes. The vast majority involve open domain extensions, which are .com, .net and .org.

The other TLDs, .int, .edu, .gov and .mil, are restricted. The domain name .arpa was recently added exclusively for Internet infrastructure purposes.

Of the new names ICANN approved this week, .info and .name will be in the open category. Meanwhile, .biz and .museum will be for the exclusive use of institutions in the related sectors.

The name .biz was in question until this week. A US court in Missouri ruled against a petition Monday from a firm that sought to prevent ICANN from adopting that domain.

The claimant company had questioned the use of .biz and .ebiz (electronic business) because, it said, it was involved in negotiations with the government of Belize about the commercial exploitation of “.bz,” which corresponds to the Caribbean nation.

In addition to the eight officially recognised generic domains so far, there are TLDs assigned for each country.

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