Big brand owners like Marriott, Nike and Verizon are gearing up for a battle in Congress and the Commerce Department over sweeping changes to the way top-level domains, such as .biz, .info, and .us, are assigned. A range of intellectual property stakeholders fear that a planned expansion of such domains by the Internet's key oversight agency will force them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their identities from fraud and infringement.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers released a draft proposal in October suggesting that any entity could apply for a domain as long as they could pay a fee of about $190,000. The application process is expected to start this year, with the first of hundreds of new domains potentially coming online late this year. ICANN Vice President Paul Levins said everyone's concerns will be considered and as a starting point, an analysis of 300 comments received by ICANN will be released in the next two weeks.

On Tuesday, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse hosted a briefing for executives and Capitol Hill staffers to discuss how Congress can get involved, but ICANN officials were told they were not welcome, Levins said. Another forum, which will be closed to the press and public, is set for Friday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Among those taking part are the Financial Services Roundtable, National Association of Manufacturers, Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America and other industry groups. ICANN officials will be on hand at that event, Levins said.

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