In an announcement which is part of the biggest expansion of the Internet address system ever since it was created in the 1980s, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - the organization which is in charge of Internet addresses - revealed the proposals for Internet suffixes on Wednesday.

With the bids for the suffixes - which form the ".com" portion in a domain name - now set for a review, which could take months or years, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said that the Internet is "about to change forever." Beckstrom further added that the Internet space is currently positioned at the cusp of a new era of online innovation, which would unfold "new businesses, new marketing tools, new jobs, new ways to link communities and share information."

About the proposals for Internet suffixes, ICANN revealed that as many as 1,930 proposals had been received for 1,409 different suffixes till the May 30 deadline. According to the information shared by ICANN, nearly 911 proposals came from North America; 675 from Europe; 303 from the Asia-Pacific region; 24 from Latin America and the Caribbean; and 17 from Africa. Nearly 100 proposals pertained to suffixes in non-English characters, including Chinese, Arabic and Thai.

In terms of submitting applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), Google and Amazon were the two most active tech firms --- with both the companies filing at least three dozen applications apiece, including at least
17 for the same suffixes like .book and .movie.