A controversial new waiting list service will make it easier for big companies to snap up expired internet domain names, say experts, leaving the little guys with little chance of grabbing the web address they want. The Waiting List Service (WLS) was approved at the weekend by the Internet Consortium for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation that controls the technology on which the internet runs. WLS was devised over two years ago by Verisign, an internet domain name company based in Mountain View, California. Verisign owns the rights to all the most popular domain names, i.e. those ending .com and .net. Verisign says WLS is necessary to allow it to deal with the enormous volume of requests it receives about these names. But some technologists and lawyers argue that WLS simply allows Verisign to make more money from its monopoly on the domain names. Verisign is being sued by eight domain name registration companies over WLS. These registrars are middlemen who scoop up domain names when they expire and sell them on to users. Derek Newman, the Seattle lawyer representing the eight registrars, says: "The Waiting List Service is a scam devised by Verisign to make more money while offering the same service. Because there is no value to the customer, this is unfair business practice." At the moment, the registrars race to buy up expired domain names. They do this using computer programs that query Verisign's servers for expired names. The customer then pays the registrar, and owns the name. The payment includes $6 a year for Verisign, plus a top-up fee depending on the popularity of the name. If several people want the name, it is auctioned, generating the biggest profits. However, under WLS, Verisign will run a waiting list for each name, and charge $29 a year to be on it. Registrars will buy places on the waiting list and then sell these to their clients, though clients could also bypass the registrar altogether. "The real problem with WLS is that you can pay the money but not get the name. Most of the alternatives only make you pay once you secure the name," says Milton Mueller, a communications professor at Syracuse University in New York, who follows ICANN's work closely. New Scientist