Identical names outside ICANN's jurisdiction have been claimed at different registries. When these sites go live, prepare for some bitter fighting.

Who owns the rights to the Internet domain name www.free.shop? Depends on whom you ask. According to New.net, the Pasadena, Calif.-based domain registry, the domain free.shop belongs to one Tariq Ghafoor of Tempe, Ariz. He registered the name for one year in March of 2001. But according to Namespace, a New York-based domain registry, the domain free.shop has been registered to Morgan Flom, a self-described "URL merchant" based in Choctaw, Okla., since June of 2000. A similar disagreement exists over www.europa.travel. New.net says it belongs to Dave Vranken in the Netherlands; Namespace says Dan Ohlemacher of Escondido, Calif., has owned it for nearly two years. Welcome to the chaos of "generic" top-level domains. As more companies enter the business of registering domain names that are outside of the few top levels authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), such as .com and .org, there is increasing confusion and bitterness about which names belong to whom. The burgeoning Babel could have very fragmenting effects on Web users. Though none of the above parties are yet running a site at free.shop or europa.travel, if and when they decide to do so, a given Web surfer might unwittingly be guided to one or the other, depending entirely on where he or she lives.