"We believe these new domain names will benefit customers," says Jill McNabb, vice president of naming services at VeriSign. "We think they will spur competition and grow the market overall. But it is critical that the new domains are introduced in a manner that protects the security and stability of the Internet. The DNS has been very reliable and very scalable given the amount of traffic going over the DNS."

McNabb admits that ICANN's processes and timeframe for introducing more gTLDs are not final.

"We think it's critical that there be continuing and ubiquitous experience for domain names even though there are some technical issues that are still being worked out," she said.

Kneuer questions ICANN's plan to introduce hundreds of new gTLDs and the process it used to analyze the impact of the plan.

"They are now undergoing the sorts of analysis on the impacts for security and stability on the core routers. They are asking some of the questions that one would have thought would have been asked and answered by this point in the process," Kneuer says. He adds that ICANN's gTLD plan "does not stand out as a sterling example" of ICANN being a competent, functional organization ready to be independent of U.S. government control.