ICANN reveals new Top-Level Domain names

MUMBAI, INDIA: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it has received a total of 1,930 new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) applications under the new generic Top-Level Domain program.

"We are standing at the cusp of a new era of online innovation. That means new businesses, new marketing tools, new jobs, and new ways to link communities and share information," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO.

Beckstrom made the comments during a conference in London on Wednesday. Post the announcement, these applications will be open to a public comment and objection period followed by a rigorous, objective and independent system. 

"A 60-day comment period begins today, allowing anyone in the world to submit comments on any application, and the evaluation panels will consider them,” said Kurt Pritz, ICANN’s senior vice president.

“If anyone objects to an application and believes they have the grounds to do so, they can file a formal objection to the application. And they will have seven months to do that," Pritz added.

Among the total 1,930 gTLD applications received, 1846 are standard applications, 84 are community based applications, 66 are geographic names applications,116 are internalized domain names (IDNs) applications for strings using non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic.

Applications were received from 60 countries and territories that included 911 from North America, 675 from Europe, 303 from Asia Pacific, while 24 applications from Latin America and the Caribbean and 17 from Africa.

Each of the applicants had to pay $185,000 as application fee and will have to pay a minimum $25,000 as yearly renewal fee.

For the first time gTLDs requests were received from Latin America/Caribbean and Africa, Beckstrom noted. Also, he added that the new gTLD program is the result of seven years of international consultation and debate among a wide variety of Internet stakeholders.

From India, Bharti Airtel Limited had applied for .airtel and .bharti, Dabur India Limited had applied for .dabur, Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited had applied for .hdfc and HDFC Bank Limited had applied for .hdfcbank.

While, Reliance Industries Limited had applied for .indians, Infosys Limited had applied for .infosys and .infy, Lupin Limited had applied for .lupin, State Bank of India had applied for .sbi and .statebank, Shriram Capital Limited had applied for .shriram and Tata Sons Limited had applied for .tata.

ICANN received many applications for identical or exactly same gTLDs such as .taxi, .team, .tech, .news, .tenis, .tube, .video, .vip, .web, .website, .wine, .yoga, .cloud and others. For this there will be an auction and bidder with the highest amount is expected to get the gTLD name.