Sign of the cross a potential goldmine

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Internet domain registration company Pdom hopes religious organisations will start a bidding war for the right to use the symbol of the cross as a web address.

The company is asking a minimum of $US20,000 ($48,590) for www.pi9028.com, $US4000 for www.pi9028.org, and $US3500 for www.pi9028.net.

"If the world's most famous commercial brands like Coke, the Nike swoosh and McDonald's are anything to go by, potentially the sign of the cross has to be worth billions of dollars," said chief executive officer Robert Wiles.

According to rules laid down by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organisation that controls domain names, a web address may consist only of letters and numbers. The only symbol allowed is the hyphen character, as long as it is not at the beginning or end of an address.

But, says Mr Wiles, these rules were relaxed last year to allow the use of Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters on an experimental basis.

United States-based internet registrar VeriSign Global Registry Services has since used the same test bed to release around 40 symbols for use as .com, .org and .net web addresses.

"Some quite interesting characters and symbols are now available," Mr Wiles said. They include the smiley face, some currency symbols, such as signs for the peseta, the euro and the shekel, and you can also register the signs for male and female. But internet users may find it difficult to access the corresponding websites.

"I'm not 100 per cent sure what they would have to type in," said Mr Wiles.

While Windows users may access the cross symbol by holding down the ALT key and typing +0134 on their numeric keyboards, entering www.pi9028.com into their browser will not yet take them to the right site.

Mr Wiles said this would work sooner or later but until that time symbol domain names were being stored at a series of web addresses beginning with BQ, such as www. BQ-eaqa.com which corresponded with www.pi9028.com.

Pdom has registered the cross symbol domains through its web development company, Personal Website Developers, but Mr Wiles admitted the only inquiries he had received so far had come from journalists.

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