They had open-neck shirts, designer spectacles and a peculiarly laid-back pose in the lounge chairs at the bar.

But the people at the cutting edge of the dot-com economy were anything but cool yesterday as they engaged in heated debate over the prospect of a new era on the internet.

Some were enthralled at the chance to register hundreds – even millions – of domain names such as .paris, .london, .news, .chocolate, .sport, .music or .love. Others were appalled at the what they described as a gift to cybersquatters. And a few expressed bewilderment at a move that might herald the end of the domination of English on the internet.

“This means increased customer choice and that can only be a good thing,” said Richard Tindal, senior vice-president of Registry, a division of the Los Angeles-based domain name registrar Demand Media Inc.

“Today it takes ten attempts to register a name on average because the first nine already exist, so this should open up new possibilities. “We might want to register fishing.com, but be unable to do so at the moment because it is already taken, for example. But fishing.sport could work.

“This is something that our customers want to see. I think there’s going to be a lot of interest and a lot of demand. The sky’s the limit.”

Roland LaPlante, senior vice-president of Afilias, the Dublin-based internet registry service provider, said businesses would be keen to adopt domains that reflected their names or identities. “You could well imagine there being a .ibm or a .thetimes or perhaps thetimes.news,” he said. But he cautioned that an excessive number of generic addresses could confuse internet users.

Alexander Schubert, a German internet strategy consultant who is pushing for the creation of a .berlin domain, also expressed doubts over generic addresses: “There are plans for a .paris and a .dubai and I’m sure we’ll get a .london, But I’m not so sure that a .music or. kids or .hearts would take off.

“For this to work, you the need the domain to represent a community: Paris is a community, London is a community, but kids or hearts are not. No one really identifies with them.”

Izumi Aizi, a researcher at the Institute of Socioeconomics at Tama University in Tokyo, said countries such as Russia, China or Japan would been keen to use domain names with their own scripts.

“The real question is whether this will lead to the fragmentation of the whole internet or whether it will remain very centralised as it is today,” he said. The English-dominated web could become a Babel’s Tower, he predicted, adding: “The history of the internet is one of surprises through unintended consequences.”

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