The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is considering 10 wide-ranging proposals for new domain name extensions that would be restricted to particular industries or groups.

The proposals for specialized top-level domains were submitted this week. ICANN is expected to announce its selections later this year.

Among the proposed name extensions that could appeal to U.S. corporations are:

* .jobs, a domain for companies to post job listings and other HR-related information that was proposed by The Society for Human Resource Management.

* .travel, a domain for the global travel industry that was proposed by Tralliance.

* .mail, a proposal from Spamhaus to create a spam-free domain system for corporations and individuals that want to eliminate unsolicited, bulk e-mail.

* .mobi, a domain proposed by Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft that would feature content and services that have been optimized for mobile devices.

* .tel, which was proposed by two different organizations, would provide a way for companies to register their telephone numbers as domain names.

Another proposal was .asia, a regional registry backed by the country-code top-level domain operators for China, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and Macao. The .asia names would be geared toward small and midsized companies doing business in Asia.

In other bids, the international postal community has proposed a .post extension that would be used to register postal services and post offices using the same abbreviations already used by the postal industry. The cultural community surrounding the Catalan language proposed their own registry, which would be dubbed .cat. And a Canadian group has proposed .xxx for online pornographic content.

ICANN will accept comments on these proposals at its Web site during the month of March.

An independent panel will review the proposals beginning in May 2004. In a statement released last Friday, ICANN said that "all applications that are found to satisfy the posted criteria will be eligible to enter into technical and commercial negotiations with ICANN for agreements for the allocation and sponsorship of the requested [top-level domains.]"

ICANN currently authorizes three specialized top-level domains: .aero for the aviation industry, .coop for cooperative businesses and .museum for museums.