The annual conference of the Internet Society (ISOC) this week brought together 1,700 participants, ranging from highly-skilled technicians to representatives of industry and various governments.

Their minds were exercised in particular by the need to expand the capacity fornew Internet addresses to cope with accelerating demand.

The monopoly exercised by the US company Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) in regulating the most popular addresses ends in September, while the US government is to cease funding the coordinating Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

``It's a very interesting and critical time,'' IANA head Jon Postel said in an interview with Agence France-Presse.

``It's very important to get the new organization, parts of the new organization that are needed to carry on thecurrent operations, in place within a couple of months.''

The first priority was to sort out new arrangements for the IANA, which also deals with questions of protocol and operations of the Internet, and in the future will have to be funded by users of the web, Postel said.

Next was the question of finding new domain names, the abbreviations at the end of an Internet address which classify the user.

``But solving all the problems about new domain names, how they work and all that kind of stuff, that can take longer, because those aren't current operations,'' Postel said.

A consensus on the new domains and who will handle the lists of new addresses with the end of the NSI monopoly has still to be reached.Ira Magaziner, senior adviser for policy development to US President Bill Clinton, said: ``I'm optimistic about the ability of the stakeholders, it's not just industry, but all the stakeholders, to get this new organization formed and get bylaws for it.''

But he warned that if talks among the Net'sparticipants failed, ``the pressure will grow for some kind of political solution."Jean-Noel Tronc, an adviser to French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said that growth of the Internet in Europe was now faster than in the United States.