Organisations have long complained that existing top-level domains - led by .com and .org and now Icann will determine the precise new domain names at a meeting early next year.

The new names are unlikely to be freely available to subscribers but limited to organisations. This follows the previous pattern of awarding .museum names for museums.

Some of the possibilities are .travel, .health and .news.

According to the BBC, any organisation can propose a name to ICANN. But it must prove that the new domain will represent a well-defined community closely associated with the domain name, and supply a $50,000 application fee.