The organisation has been criticised over its existing systems for creating new domain names. The most recent round of approvals, in November 2000, resulted in only seven new top level domains, namely: .biz, .name, .museum, .pro, .aero, .coop and .info. despite forty-seven applications having been made, at a cost of $50,000 each.
According to ICANN a new strategic initiative will now be launched, with the intention of achieving full globalisation of the market for TLDs.
This will include considering new TLDs, an evaluation of the standards required for multilingual TLDs. At present, even where web addresses are written in scripts such as Arabic or Cyrillic, the address must end with .com, or .net or another domain using English characters.
In addition ICANN announced that more sponsored generic top level domains (where the domains relate to specific communities, such as the existing .museum) are to be available in 2004. The approvals process will be much less secretive this time. According to the Washington Post, ICANN President Paul Twomey said:
"The expectation is that we would be moving to some regime that is a more open process - a more continuous process."
In a statement, Twomey said:
"This round of applications will help us engage the community in the process and to further evaluate the best manner to achieve the appropriate balance between corporate/sponsor control of TLDs and ICANN's role of 'management on behalf of the Internet community'."