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Two thousand applications for registration of new domains have been submitted

On June 13, as previously promised, the international organization ICANN opened a list of all applications for registration of new top-level domain names. In total, we received almost two thousand proposals from more than 500 companies. Now ICANN will decide which domains are destined to appear on the Internet, and which can wait. This process can take anywhere from nine months to a year.

ICANN, which received the authority to formally govern the Internet in the late 90s (this includes the allocation of new domain zones), until recently was in no hurry to increase the number of registered domains. Yes, some specialized zones were introduced to relieve some of the burden on the ubiquitous .com, but the main increase was due to the emergence of domains for states.

The landmark decision to allow organizations to register their own zones was made in June 2011, a year after serious discussions about this possibility began. The decision stipulated that any company (but not an individual) that was willing to shell out $185,000 and could ensure the continued functioning of the domain could register its domain.

On January 12, 2012, the actual acceptance of applications began. It was originally supposed to last until April 12, but ICANN encountered some “technical difficulties” on the last day. Because of them, the acceptance of applications was frozen several times, and in the end it ended on May 30. By the way, these “technical difficulties” themselves led to a small data leak : some users of the system could see information about the applications of others.

However, the authors themselves announced some of the proposed domains in advance. For example, plans to register the .moscow and .moscow zones have been discussed for many years, and a special website was even created to support the idea. On it, in particular, you can vote for the creation of a new domain, and at the time of writing, the counter showed the beautiful number 17666.

about the zone The children also spoke more than once. In recent months, Russian authorities and Internet experts have been vying with each other about the need to create a reservation for children on the Runet, protected from scary and harmful content. There’s really no way to do this without a separate children’s domain.

In addition to Moscow, Tatarstan also wanted to get its own piece of the Internet. The domain .tatar (why not .Tatar ?), as reported to the ITAR-TASS agency , is cultural and linguistic and is intended for speakers of the Tatar language. “The new domain will help the Tatar community better identify itself in the multilingual global Internet environment,” noted the initiators of the domain creation, citing the experience of the Catalan cat zone .cat , which has existed since 2005.

) have applied for their domains Among Russian commercial companies, NIS-GLONASS ( .gdn ) and Yandex ( .yandex . One would expect such an initiative from the main search engine of the entire Runet - that’s why he is a leader. Things didn’t turn out so rosy with Glonass: not only is the need for a special zone not obvious, but also the same .gdn domain was encroached upon by the British The Guardian (which, in turn, is being prevented from acquiring the .guardian domain by the American insurance company of the same name) .

remains the most unclear The fate of the Cyrillic domain .rus , initiated by the Russian Language Internet Center and the registrar Webnames.ru, . Back in June 2011, they said that the domain was intended for use by the “global Russian-speaking community.” The zone, as conceived by the creators, should be supranational and unite Russian-language resources from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the USA and, for some reason, Norway.

The initiative, it must be said, was received very coldly by the Russian IT community, and it’s clear why: even .рф at one time seemed superfluous, but here’s another one. And .rus is not a very good wording, because it can be mistakenly perceived as Latin .pyc . However, if a zone is created, at least Python developers will be happy - scripts written in this language have the extension .pyc .

Large foreign companies also presented few surprises and, to the extent possible and appropriate, applied for domains corresponding to their main trademarks. The record holder was, of course, Google , which decided to register 100 zones at once (for each, let us remember, 185 thousand dollars): here are the understandable .google , .youtube , .android , .chrome , .gmail , and the completely cybersquatter .baby , . family , .film , .fly , .fun , .fyi , .here , .home , .lol , .love , .meme , .vip , .wow and many others.

of the IT industry giants turned out to be more modest: Apple wanted only .apple , Microsoft , wanted .bing .hotmail .microsoft , The rest , .skype , .windows and a few more quite expected domains; Facebook and Twitter decided to do without them altogether. The most popular domains turned out to be .app (used as an abbreviation for application), which was claimed by 13 companies, and .home (11 applications).

Representatives of the porn industry also did not ignore ICANN’s proposal: .sex wanted ICM Registry, which already owns the .xxx domain , and a certain Internet Marketing Solutions Limited . Registrar Uniregistry made a smart move and applied for .sexy . ICM will try to get the .pornM domain , and if it succeeds, it will begin to distribute zone similar addresses in other porn domains to owners of sites in the .xxx . She needs this in order to fend off accusations of trying to profit from ordinary companies that occupy domains in such zones to protect their good name.

Among other applications, we can note several more Cyrillic domains, which were proposed to be created by companies not from Russia (but Russians, theoretically, will be able to use such zones). The Vatican decided to create the .catholic domain for itself , and the Czech company CORE Association - .online and .site . In addition, it was proposed to register two tracing zones from existing ones: .com and .org . is also close to the Russian ear . The word .vodka , for which an offshore company from the Virgin Islands has applied,

ICANN will now decide when certain addresses will become available for registration and whether they will become available at all. The organization will evaluate how financially sound the applicant is, whether he has the technical capabilities to maintain the operation of the domain, and other indicators. In controversial situations, ICANN will evaluate whose application more fully reflects the request of the Internet community, and if there are still doubts, it will hold an auction. All these procedures will take from 9 to 12 months, so in 2013 we can already expect a “dot-brand” boom.

True, not in each of these zones a mere mortal will be able to register a beautiful address. Here everything depends on the conditions that this or that applicant presents: he wants to share his domain or decides to keep all the addresses for himself.

In any case, it is obvious that this is a brand thing, and not a financial one: only “porn people” will be able to earn or at least “recoup” the costs of registering a top-level domain at an adequate price for one address. Well, ICANN received a good replenishment of its treasury.

Sultan Suleimanov

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