The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has published a list of applications for new top-level domains.
This new gTLD program of ICANN leads to the most substantive changes to the Domain Name System (DNS) in the Internet’s history. Totally ICANN has received 1930 applications. Considering that the cost of one application is 185 thousand dollars (not counting the money spent on paperwork, legal fees, infrastructure requirements and many other costs), ICANN has earned about 350 million dollars.
Thirteen different companies applied for the domain .app, including Amazon, Google, multiple entities of Dot App, and other smaller companies. The other popular domains are: .home and .inc (11 applications); .art (10); blog, .llc and .book (9); .design, .movie and .music (8); .ltd, .news, .now and .store (7); .baby, .corp, .cpa, .gmbh, .law, .love, .mail, .now, .online, .tech, .vip and .web (6).
According to a CNN sources, the biggest participants is a company called Donuts Inc., which applied for 307 top-level domains.
Google became one of the most active bidders submitted more than 100 applications including not only company’s own trademark, such as .google, .youtube, .gmail, .android and etc. Also Google claimed for .love, .mom, .dog, .foo and .wow.
Nevertheless, the majority of applications (1179) claimed by only one applicant. While the majority of applications were for Roman alphabet domains, there were quite a number of foreign language applications with most being in Chinese.
Vatican applied for catholic domain not only in Roman alphabet, but also in Chinese, in Arabic and in Cyrillic.
Among eight applications for Cyrillic domains just three submitted by Russian companies. Smart Internet Foundation applied for .ДЕТИ to develop friendly Internet in Russia, FAITIH (Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development) claimed for .МОСКВА, Rusnames Limited – for .РУС.
The other applications belong to organizations based in USA and Europe (.САЙТ, .ОНЛАЙН, .КОМ, .ОРГ, and .КАТОЛИК). The rest Russian applications including .skolkovo,. gdn,. yandex, as well as applications for geographic domains .moscow and. tatar, represent the interests of cultural and linguistic community.
You can find the full list of applications at the ICANN Web site. Check it out to see what may be the future of the Internet.