n multiple cities or countries. Tracking and Managing Top-Level Domain Names The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organiza- tion responsible for managing the technical aspects of the databases of domain names in root servers. In a web or e-mail address such as name@companyname.com, the .com portion is the top-level domain name, and companyname is the domain name, which is also referred to as the secondary-level domain name. Every country has a top- level domain name. For example, for China, it's .cn; for Russia, it's .ru. In the United States, some top-level domain names include .edu and .mil for educational and military institutions, and.gov for the government. Voting ICANN board members are appointed by the United States Department of Commerce. Until 2009, the Department of Commerce had sole responsibility for these policies. However, increasing criticism by other countries regarding what they feel to be too much control by the United States of major aspects of the Internet has led to the establishment of international review and policy determination. Currently, the United States continues to control ICANN even in the face of mounting pressure from coun- tries such as Russia and China to cede control to the United Nations. The Inclusion of Non-Western Domain Names Initially, addressing systems used only the Roman alphabet character set (A-Z, a-z, the digits 0-9, and the hyphen). However, pressure from countries that use other character systems eventually led to the inclusion of other alphabets for addresses. These non- Roman languages include Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. China, South Korea, and Arabic-speaking nations had already started assigning non- Roman domain names. These addresses introduced the possibility of duplicate domain names because they were outside of the root system. This created pressure for ICANN to alter their addressing requirements and move forward with making the technical changes in the root system that translations from othe