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An investigation by ICANN, the organisation that oversees the domain name system, has concluded that the only barrier to adopting common extensions such as .mp3 and .pdf as domains is the possibility that users may become confused.

However, it believes that keeping track of popular extensions and barring them would be too difficult a task and having consulted with browser developers and finding no technical barriers, is willing to go ahead with the scheme.

"Given

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preliminary feedback that there is not a technical need to prevent file extensions as top level domains (TLD), as well as the lack of an authoritative source of common file extensions to draw from, staff determined that it is not workable to prevent common file extensions from being used as TLDs," says ICANN in its report.

While filename extensions will be allowed, TLDs solely made up of numbers won't. Addresses such as .123 would confuse browsers as they convert web addresses into numeric IP addresses.

Similarly TLDs beginning with .0x will be disallowed since it is used to denote hexadecimal strings, and these are also converted to IP addresses in some instances.

ICANN is expected to begin inviting submissions for new TLDs later this year, to meet the growing demand for web addresses.