The Internet’s key oversight agency has quietly authorized Iraq’s new government to manage its own domain name, allowing for the restoration of Internet addresses ending in “.iq.”

The suffix had been in limbo after the 2002 federal indictment of the Texas-based company that was running it on charges of funneling money to a member of the Islamic terrorist group Hamas.

InfoCom Corporation, which sold computers and Web services in the Middle East and got the “.iq” assignment in 1997, was convicted in April along with its chief executive and two brothers.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees top-level domains, unanimously approved transferring the “.iq” name to Iraq’s telecommunications regulator on July 28.

The decision to award “.iq”came during a private teleconference call among ICANN board members. The approved resolution was quietly posted this week on an inside ICANN Web page – two clicks from the home page – and got little attention until the Web journal Lextext remarked on it on Thursday.

American and Iraqi officials had urged ICANN to free up “.iq” quickly after the American invasion in 2003, partly so government ministries could standardize their Web addresses. Without use of “.iq,” the Iraqi telecommunications regulator was forced to turn to a more generic suffix and use “ncmciraq.org,” while the Iraq Museum took “the.iraq.museum.”

ICANN resisted, though, telling applicants there were too many uncertainties about the stability of Iraq to immediately assign the domain to someone else.

Officials from ICANN, selected by the U.S. Commerce Department as its agent for Internet addressing policies, did not immediately return telephone and e-mail messages Friday seeking more details and the reason ICANN is now making the assignment.

The adopted ICANN resolution said only that the organization “has determined that the proposed redelegation would be in the best interests of the local and global Internet communities.”

Although companies and individuals in America are accustomed to adopting a moniker bearing the global suffixes”.com,””.net,” and “.org,” largely shunning the country’s own “.us,” domain names are a source of national pride elsewhere.

Palestinian Arabs got “.ps” in 1999, allowing them to avoid using the more cumbersome “ps.int” or sharing Israel’s “.il.”The European Union, meanwhile, is setting up “.eu” for the region.

More than 260 Internet suffixes are now approved, including recent additions such as “.mobi”, targeting mobile services, and “.jobs” for the human resources community.