Have you been hearing quite a bit about the upcoming custom TLDs lately? A few domain names that may appear in the near future are .google, .apple, .microsoft, .app, .book, .android, .search, and the list goes on. These are custom top level domains, slightly different from the existing generic top level domains you know, such as .com, .org, .net, .info, .mil, .edu, .biz, .gov, etc. Each of these generic TLDs has its own use; for instance, .mil is allocated for military websites only, while .gov is for government websites.
When it comes to custom TLDs, anybody can apply and get a TLD that they would like. It could be your name, your company name, or any word you choose. ICANN (Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers) manages TLDs and custom TLDs across the world. The corporation announced that it would take applications for these custom TLDs on in Singapore, and the application process started between and .
Around that time, ICANN also published this guidebook for applicants to study. For the better part of the morning, I was going through that document and a number of ICANN resources related to gTLD applications. Let me share the findings in this article.
All those applications submitted during that period went through a series of steps, including evaluations and dispute resolution. When one company submits an application for a TLD like ‘.book’ as in the case of Amazon, competing companies are sure to dispute. This has to be taken into account. GAC early warning (Governmental Advisory Committee) is another thing that ICANN considers in evaluation of the applications.
This is a warning issued by a GAC entity if it considers one of the applications to potentially cause issues to governments.
There are quite a number of steps an application for cgTLD has to go through. And it takes roughly nine months for an application to pass considering everything is right, and it could be more than that, up to 20 months.
There is significance to this. If the first of the applications were submitted before April 2012, then those applications should be at the end of processing by now, or some are still in process. We are getting a lot of information about the status of these custom gTLDs.
And one other thing, ICANN received and analyzed applications only from recognized, established organizations, and not individuals. Also, there was a huge application fee of 185,000 plus some additional fees in special situations. You can get the details of the current application status of these applicants in this ICANN page.
Moving Forward
ICANN did publish its future roadmap on Aug 17, last year. And in this roadmap, there are quite a number of events that ICANN has noted. They are as follows:
The already obtained GAC early warnings have been published by ICANN here. Between 14 and 18 of October last year, ICANN did meet in Toronto. A few things that happened in the meeting were as follows: evaluation of the applications would be carried out according to the number of applications; also, IDN applicants (Internationalized Domain Name) would be given priority.
The latest statistics of ICANN gTLD applicants is as follows:
Right now, there are 1912 applications, and 19 have withdrawn already. Out of these applications, 116 are IDNs. Specific to the continent, number of applications is as follows: Asia/Pacific with 303, Europe with 675, North America with 911 (weirdly so), Latin America and Caribbean with 24, and Africa with 17.
Recent News
The search giant, Google has applied for over 101 gTLDs, and Google has recently published a post about this. Here are the gTLDs applied for:
An interesting thing is if you go through the applicants list, you won’t find Google’s name anywhere. It has applied for all these TLDs under Charleston Road Registry Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Although Google is already a domain registrar, it operates these applications under Charleston Road Registry. Here is a small list of interesting gTLDs applied by some of our major tech giants:
Acer: ACER
Amazon: AWS, AMAZON, BUY, BOX, BOOK, AUTHOR, BOT, APP, GAME, FREE, HOT, FAST, DRIVE, MUSIC, MOVIE, READ, PIN, etc.
AOL: PATCH, AOL
Apple: APPLE
Cisco Technology, Inc.: CISCO
Dell: DELL
Fujitsu Ltd.: FUJITSU
HTC: HTC
HITACHI:HITACHI
International Business Machines Corp: IBM
IEEE Global:IEEE
Intel Corporation:INTEL, ULTRABOOK
Microsoft Corporation: BING, OFFICE, DOCS, SKYPE, WINDOWS, HOTMAIL, LIVE, SKYDRIVE, XBOX, MICROSOFT
Nokia Corporation: NOKIA
Oracle Corporation: ORACLE, JAVA
Samsung: SAMSUNG
Sony: SONY, PLAYSTATION, XPERIA
Google and Amazon are two of the largest applicants in this. Another major company that has applied for 61 TLDs is Famous Four Media, a gTLD service provider located in London. They have, under various names, applied for TLDs like MONEY, MOVIE, LONDON, BABY, FASHION, PARTY, BET, BID, CASINO, CHAT, FORUM, HEALTH, GIFT, NEWS, MUSIC, POKER, RUGBY, SCIENCE, DOWNLOAD, TAXI, MEN, WIN, CHARITY, PLAY, etc.
After the IDN list, some of the high-priority TLDs include Amazon’s PLAY and BUY, ENERGY by Binky Birch LLC, FOOD by Lifestyle Domain Holdings, etc.
ICANN’s CEO, Fadi Chehade has mentioned that by April 23, the first custom gTLDs should move to delegation phase. This means, we may be able to see some of these custom TLDs in a few months ahead. Most of these applicants probably already have the necessary settings and infrastructure to make these custom TLDs widely available. There is also a speculation that top registrars like Google may be making their custom TLDs available to the general public, in the form of blogs and social networks.
Another thing to look forward to is how these custom TLDs are received. Some of them are ridiculously large, such as NORTHWESTERNMUTUAL, applied by Northwestern Mutual Registry, LLC, WEATHERCHANNEL by The Weather Channel LLC, TRAVELERSINSURANCE by Travelers TLD LLC, and GUARDIANMEDIA and THEGUARDIAN by the Guardian UK newspaper.
Nobody would be interested to type in a website address like “northwesternmutual.northewesternmutual” on the address bar and visit that page.
There is, however, an attractive reason why these companies are going for these TLDs, for instance, a page inside apple.com, in the form of “apple.com/iphone/” can be now reformatted as “iphone.apple”. The thing to be noted is that “iphone.apple” and “main.apple” are two different websites, such as “apple.com” and “google.com”. Also, there is a possibility that a custom gTLD representing a specific business may be acquired by a different entity. Out of the fear of this, companies have actively tried to gather TLDs representing their major trademarks.
Even then, one thing that baffles is why Apple didn’t apply for ‘iphone’, ‘ipad’, etc., and others like Samsung, HTC, etc., have registered only one or two TLDs. Some other tech giants, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Sprint, LG, Facebook, etc., are mysteriously missing from the list. There may be some reason why these companies either got rejected or haven’t quite met the application requirements. We will have to wait only a few more months to see exactly where these TLDs are going. We will update you.