ICANN Announces Requested gTLDs

A week shy of a year ago now ICANN revealed a process to allow organizations to submit applications for new generic top level domain extensions (in addition to the .com, .net, .org and 18 others excluding ccTLDs). You can get more detail in my post Make Your Own TLD? (I want .bacon).

Today ICANN has revealed the list of gTLDs for which random people and businesses have applied. During the January 12 — May 30, 2012 window to submit applications, 1,930 came in.

The process wasn’t without some controversy, as when 87 business associations and companies banded together to oppose the process, as outlined in this November 2011 press release: Eighty-Seven Major National and International Business Associations and Companies Join with ANA, Forming the Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight (CRIDO), to Oppose ICANN’s Top-level Domain Expansion Program

Despite that, the ICANN process has been moving along. If, like me, you are curious about the gTLDs for which people are vying, you can get the full list as a CSV file from ICANN, or you can search through the list on the ICANN site.

Of the 1,930 gTLDs, 116 of them are in character sets that the average English-speaking American won’t ever see or be able to use (such as Chinese, Cyrillic, and so on). As you go through them, you’ll see lots of brand and company names, and even a few slogans in the mix. You’ll see some cases where a brand name (such as .youtube) is not registered by the brand owner (Google, in this case), or perhaps ones where the target audience seems a little too targeted (such as .aarp).

Selected Duplicates

Of the remaining (the ones I can read), some of them seem odd, some of them seem too long to type, and some of them are duplicates which means an auction process will kick in to determine who should get rights. Of the over 750 duplicates, here are some of the ones that stood out to me (or just look at my favorites):

Favorites

And now some of my favorites:

• .adult
• .afamilycompany
• .diet (three of these)
• .dot (there were two of these)
• .dotafrica (for the slashdot-literate)
• .family
• .fish
• .foo
• .goo
• .gripe
• .hiphop
• .ieee
• .imdb (by Amazon)
• .ketchup
• .kids
• .law
• .lawyer
• .legal
• .lgbt
• .lol (two of these)
• .men (with no corresponding .women)
• .mormon
• .ninja (for all those self-declared web and social media experts)
• .porn (but no corresponding .pr0n)
• .republican (with no corresponding .democrat or .libertarian)
• .sex (two of these)
• .sexy
• .sucks (three of these)
• .web (seven of these)
• .website (three of these)
• .wtf

So there is a proposal for .ketchup, but nothing for .bacon? Internets, you have let me down.

Related

1. Icann [sic] reveals new internet top-level domain name claims at BBC
2. Here comes .NETFLIX: New Web domain applications revealed at CNN Money
3. ICANN unveils new domain names at net Magazine.
4. Make Your Own TLD? (I want .bacon) by me

Update: 11:41am

I see a lot of traffic coming to this post from people looking for “Charleston Road Registry.” A couple minutes in the ICANN application shows that not only does that entity have its address at Google HQ, but the contact is Google’s policy analyst. From the application (section 18(a)):

Charleston Road Registry is an American company, wholly owned by Google, which was established to provide registry services to the Internet public. […] As discussed further in the responses to questions 23 and 31, Charleston Road Registry intends to outsource all critical registry functions to Google Registry Services.

I have updated the table above accordingly.

Update: May 8, 2013

The marketing manager for names.co.uk guest-writes a post at .net Magazine (“Google sets precedent for new gTLDs to be open“) detailing how Google may be opening up any of the new gTLDs it acquires, instead of restricting their use to just Google brands. The writer hopes others will follow Google’s lead.