ICANN has today announced the list of Top Level Domains (TLDs) that have been applied for by big brands and other organisations. Anyone with the capability to operate a TLD is eligible to apply to run domains such as .hotel or .beer. Many big brands have also applied to run their .brand domain, and, inevitably, some domains have attracted numerous competing applications.
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Jonathan Robinson of Afilias, the domain name registry operations company behind .info, .mobi, and 14 other TLDs, said:
"Today marks a significant change in the history of the Internet. Now the much-anticipated 'dot Brand' names have been announced, it's interesting to see that businesses are not just looking to apply for their own .extension, but also generic suffixes including .health, .style and .cars to help command their digital presence in a certain industry."
Michele Neylon of Irish Registrar Blacknight gave us his initial observations:
"Not surprisingly .app has the biggest number of competing applications – a total of 13!
"There's also a number of applications which aren't direct conflicts, but are likely to cause headaches for each other eg. .sale vs .forsale.
"What's interesting to see is that both Amazon and Walmart have applied for IDN names ie. non Latin characters. Amazon has applied for .food and .cloud in IDN."
Now that the applications are in, there will be a lengthy process to decide who gets to run the domains that have multiple applications, but it's likely that a first batch of uncontested domains will go live within the next year.
