ICANN Reveals the Possible list of New Top Level Domain Names over Internet

On June 13, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization in charge of basic Internet name and addressing revealed the much awaited list of possible new top level domain names over the Internet. This has happened after six years of debate, embarking ICANN’s plans to liberalize Internet Domain Name space.
At a press conference in London, ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom, revealed there had been 1,930 applications for new gTLDs. “This is an historic day for the Internet and the two billion people around the world that depend on it,” Beckstrom said. “These are just applications. They are not yet approved and some of them may not be. None of them will enter the Internet until they have undergone a rigorous, objective and independent evaluation.” He added further.
More than half of the applications have come from North America, home to Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon. While a total number of 303 applications came from Asia Pacific and 17 from Africa. This list release begins a 60-day comment period where both the general public and parties such as trademark owners will have the opportunity to comment or object to possible new domains.
For the first time, brands like Adidas and Apple have been able to apply for their own Top Level Domains (gTLDs) – or even secure generic “strings” like .sports and .music. The potential new top level domain names vary widely in their descriptiveness. In many cases, they represent brand names or trademarks that were applied for by the trademark or brand owners. Some of these include .bananarepublic, .dupont, .goodhands, .macys, .nissan and .swatch. Notably while Google applied for .google and Microsoft applied for .windows, Apple applied for .apple, IBM applied for .ibm, neither Facebook nor Twitter applied for their respective names. Other names are descriptive of the applicant’s business or interest, such as .stroke from the American Heat Association and .kosher from the Kosher Marketing Assets, LLC. The list also includes geographies and communities, including .nyc, .hamburg, .wales, .africa and .tokyo. In addition, under the gTLD program, non-Latin characters are also made available which would result in availability of the proposed gTLDs in Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean alphabets and characters.
Interestingly, a significant number of potential new top-level domains are common in nature, descriptive terms that may or may not be associated with a particular brand or industry. These include two applications for .docs—one from Microsoft and another from Google—also, .hotel and .hotels, .blog, .news, .inc, and .kids, many of which were proposed by several applicants. There were some big surprises, like the multitude of companies going after .APP (13 applicants in all), the most aggressive applicant was a company called “Charleston Road Registry Inc.” that applied for 101 domain names. Charleston Road Registry Inc. actually is an entity that will manage Google’s gTLD portfolio. This means that Google has in fact topped the position for applying for one more than a hundred new Top level domains. They include name such as .goog, .google, .youtube, .gmail, .android and other properties associated with Google. It has also applied for many extremely common domain names such as .baby, .blog, .buy, .boo, .lol, .fly, .free, .game and many more. ICANN will take in about $357,000,000 for the $185,000 per application. So, we can say that Google has invested a small country’s GDP for new gTLDs.
The potential list of new gTLDs is now available and the comment window is now open. While many may not survive, it is likely anticipated that several hundred will and will have a significant impact on the Internet as we know it today.