The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began discussing extending the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains) in 2005. Existing gTLDs include .com, .org or .biz. Improving Network Uptime and CapacityThursday's decision will not, of itself, create specific new gTLDs: The board has simply approved a policy proposal that will form the basis of a set of rules for creating and managing new gTLDs. Until now ICANN has kept close control over the creation of TLDs, but Thursday's vote could allow the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the .com TLD today -- over 70 million. It could open the way for big corporations to run their own domains -- france.ebay instead of ebay.fr, for instance -- or for linguistic communities to create transnational domains on the model of the existing .cat domain for speakers of Catalan.