NEW YORK — Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, is none too keen on the ICANN proposal to add ten new top-level domains to the Internet.

Berners-Lee spent quite a bit of his Wednesday morning World Wide Web Conference keynote address here attacking the proposed additions.

ICANN submitted a request for proposal for the new domain names on December 15, 2003. Trade organizations and other "sponsors" submitted all proposals by March 16, 2004.. Among the new domain names under consideration: .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mail, .mobi, .post, .tel, .travel and .xxx. If the domains are approved, they could become active by early 2005.

Read More About the Latest ICAN Expansion Proposal

Berners-Lee recently wrote a white paper criticizing the ICANN domain expansion, entitled "New Top-Level Domains Considered Harmful." On May 14, the W3C Technical Advisory Group resolved to support the document.

Berners-Lee — who also is the director of the W3C consortium and a senior research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — argued that adding domain names indiscriminately is not the best way to insure the Web can scale up and out.

As evidence, he pointed to the handful of new domain names added in 2000, including .biz and .info.

These new domain names haven't expanded the total pool of available domain names, as many expected, Berners-Lee said. Instead, many companies that already own .com and .net domain names have felt pressured to buy up the .biz and .info equivalents to protect their brands.

For small companies, the resulting situation is a racket, Berners-Lee said. And even larger companies, which have invested substantially in their short domain names as key branding elements, have been unhappy with the pressure, he added.

"When you print money, you devalue the money you already printed," Berners-Lee told conference attendees.

Berners-Lee called out for criticism the newly proposed .xxx domain name for adult content.

"We've been here before," he said. "People have very different ideas of what is adult content."

Instead of attempting to group all adult content under a .xxx brand, he said, metadata and filters can be used more effectively to create an adult-content repository.

Berners-Lee also questioned the grounds for a .mobi mobile domain. The .mobi has the backing of Nokia, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and others.

Even though there is a need for more content that can be browsable from PDAs and cell phones, a separate domain isn't the way to achieve this, Berners-Lee said.

"What happens when you run .mobi (content) on a laptop?" he asked. "It's a mess."

Another problem: The definition of "mobile" is constantly changing, Berners-Lee said. "What's a 'small' screen? What's 'low' bandwidth? It changes second-by-second and year-by-year."

There are better solutions for encouraging the growth of mobile Web content, such as designating a mobile search portal as a preferred port of entry, he claimed.

Berners-Lee isn't totally dead-set against expanding domain names. He said he sees some cases where it would make sense, such as with telephone numbers and/or latitude and longitude data.

If new-domain proposals move forward, Berners-Lee said they should be administered by a nonprofit; be technically sound (and not break the Web); and not be a simple money-grab scheme.

Berners-Lee also spent part of his keynote championing his favorite cause, the "semantic Web." Unlike the current hypertext-centric worldwide Web, the semantic Web is all about connecting data. As envisioned by Berners-Lee, the semantic Web would function like a giant database comprised of interrelated metadata.